[Radiologic diagnosis of the middle ear. Possibilities and perspectives]

During the past few years the importance of imaging methods for the diagnosis of head and neck diseases has increased significantly. Due to the rapid development of new techniques like "high-resolution" CT (HR-CT) and magnetic resonance imaging, radiology has become an important factor in the preoperative evaluation of many diseases in our discipline. The middle ear region in particular is known to be a complicated area and was often hard to interpret by radiological methods used so far. In the present paper the diagnostic value of HR-CT is demonstrated. Over the past two years we examined 130 patients suffering from middle ear diseases like malformations (MEM), otosclerosis, cholesteatoma and temporal bone fractures (TBF) with HR-CT. From our point of view the indications for this special examinations should be limited to MEM and TBF. The results and side effects of HR-CT and conventional tomography are compared and discussed. Finally, future perspectives of middle ear imaging are presented. Different reconstructive techniques have been developed during the past years, which might supply additional information for further questions arising in middle ear pathology in the future. At the present time none of these methods are ready for routine clinical use.