Spectrum of appearances on CT and MRI of hepatic epithelioid hemangioendothelioma

BMC Gastroenterology

Research Article

Hui Xiao¹  Min-Yi Cui²  Zhi Dong³  Yanji Luo³  Zi-Ping Li³  Lisha Zhou³  Kun Huang³  Shi-Ting Feng³  Juxin Xiong⁴  Ling Xu⁵ 

[1] Department of Pathology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China;Department of Radiology, Hospital of Stomatology, Guanghua School of Stomatology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangdong, China;Department of Radiology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China;Department of Radiology, The Third People’s Hospital of Dongguan City, Dongguan, China;University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia;

关键词: Liver;    Epithelioid hemangioendothelioma;    Computed tomography;    Magnetic resonance imaging;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12876-015-0299-x

 received in 2015-05-19, accepted in 2015-06-05,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThis study aims to analyze the computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) characteristics of hepatic epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (HEHE).MethodsEleven patients with histopathologically confirmed HEHE via surgical excision or biopsy were included. Imaging findings of these 11 patients were retrospectively analyzed (CT images obtained from all patients and MR images from five patients). Patterns of growth, characteristics of distribution, density/signal features, patterns of contrast enhancement, and changes of adjacent tissues were evaluated.ResultsHEHE is characterized by multiple lesions in the liver. HEHE could be further categorized as three types when considering patterns of growth: nodular type(5 cases), coalescent type(1 case) and mixed type(5 cases). In this study, a total of 312 lesions were detected, 214(74.3 %) of which were subcapsular. All lesions appeared as hypodense while round lower density were found within 10 lesions(<2 cm) on unenhanced CT images. On MRI, all lesions demonstrated low signal intensity on T1 weighted images and high heterogeneous signal intensity on T2 weighted images when compared to the normal liver parenchyma. Other imaging features included “lollipop sign”(6 cases) and capsular retraction(6 cases). On contrast-enhanced CT and MRI, lesions smaller than 2.0 cm mostly showed mild homogeneous enhancement (214/227, 94.3 %); lesions measuring 2.0–3.0 cm in diameter showed ring-like enhancement (16/53,30.2 %) and heterogeneous delayed enhancement (29/53,54.7 %); lesions larger than 3.0 cm demonstrated heterogeneous delayed enhancement (26/32, 81.3 %).ConclusionThe imaging findings of HEHE showed some typical imaging features and size-dependent patterns with contrast enhancement on both CT and MR images, these features can be used for accurate imaging diagnosis of HEHE.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zhou et al. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.