Salivary Glands

The salivary glands may be afflicted by a wide variety of inflammatory, infectious, and neoplastic processes. This often creates difficulty in arriving at a specific imaging diagnosis. Knowledge of glandular anatomy and pertinent clinical data is vital to the radiologist to arrive at a reasonably short list of differential diagnoses and provide information that is of importance to the otolaryngologist for surgical planning. This chapter discusses basic salivary gland anatomy and imaging appearances of the more common glandular disorders and also provides a table of differential diagnosis based on pattern recognition. A brief section that discusses the otolaryngologist’s approach to the evaluation of salivary gland disease is also included.