Negative resection margins are of critical importance for patients who are treated for cancer by surgery as this will help prevent a return of the disease and gives a better chance for survival. Furthermore, additional treatments can be avoided. Despite the well-known negative effects of positive margins on patient’s prognosis and quality of live, positive resection margins keep occuring frequently. Therefore, it appears that the current methods to assess the resection margins during surgery (intraoperatively) are not reliable enough. There is need for improved strategies, which has lead to development of numerous new imaging techniques for intraoperative assessment of resection margins.

In this thesis, an overview was provide of the current status of these innovative imaging techniques and the role of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for intraoperative margin assessment was evaluated in resection specimens of the prostate, vulva, and tongue.