[Ultrasound diagnosis of face and neck organs]

Sonography of the neck and face is highly suited for confirming visible, palpable or generally tentative findings. A method of performing a systematic examination will be described in detail and followed by numerous examples descriptive of soft tissue pathologies of the face, salivary glands and lymph nodes. The thyroid gland will be dealt with in a different report. The criterion that applied to all masses was that it was only possible to render a tentative diagnosis to be subsequently confirmed by sonography-guided fine-needle aspiration. Histological follow-up, however, was never excluded. If a finding could not be narrowed down by sonography, the next step was to use computerized or nuclear magnetic resonance imaging.