Background.Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) has been introduced in head and neck cancers.Due to limitations in the performance of laryngeal DWI,including the complex anatomical structure of the larynx leading to susceptibility effects,the value of DWI in differentiating benign from malignant laryngeal lesions has largely been ignored.We assessed whether a threshold for the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) was useful in differentiating preoperative laryngeal carcinomas from precursor lesions by turbo spin-echo (TSE) DWI and 3.0 T magnetic resonance.