Tumors of muscular origin

Abstract

Generally speaking, tumors of muscular origin are not common. The radiological literature is limited mainly to case reports [17, 27, 38, 55, 59], and even when series of soft tissue tumors are reported, the number of muscular lesions remains low [33, 49]. In two fundamental papers based on lesions seen by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology over a 10-year period, Kransdorf reported 311 benign tumors of muscular origin (leiomyomas) out of a total of 18,677 benign soft tissue tumors, or 1.7% [32]. Among the 12,370 malignant soft tissue tumors, there were 1,039 leiomyosarcomas (8.4%) and 239 rhabdomyosarcomas (1.9%). The recently concluded Multicentric European Study on Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Soft Tissue Tumors observed 26 tumors of muscular origin out of a total of almost 800 randomly reported cases [14]. Although muscle tumors have been well described and classified histologically, imaging techniques have remained of limited value in specifying the tissue diagnosis of these masses.However, the newer imaging modalities com- puted tomography (CT) and, especially, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have brought some progress in this field.