Sonographic evaluation of operability of malignant cervical lymph nodes

Infiltration of the carotid artery by malignant cervical nodes is considered to be a contraindication for radical neck dissection in many centers. Clinical examination alone is unlikely to provide information on the fixity of nodes to the carotid artery. We studied the role of ultrasonography as an adjunct to clinical examination in screening patients for neck dissection. Twenty-seven patients with clinical neck node metastasis were chosen for ultrasonography. All of them had surgery and the findings were correlated. The findings revealed that this procedure is effective in delineating involvement of carotid artery by neck nodes and in identifying false-positive and false-negative cases. Since the sample of patients studied was small, the study is continuing in order to accrue a larger sample.