Cavernous hemangioma of thymus misdiagnosed as thymoma: a case report

World Journal of Surgical Oncology

Case Report

Yasha Liang¹  Huan Xu²  Cheng Shen³  Lunxu Liu³  Guowei Che³ 

[1] Department of General Practice, West-China Hospital, Sichuan University, 610041, Chengdu, China;Department of Pathology, West-China Hospital, Sichuan University, 610041, Chengdu, China;Department of Thoracic Surgery, West-China Hospital, Sichuan University, 610041, Chengdu, China;

关键词: cavernous hemangioma;    surgery;    thymus;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1477-7819-12-323

 received in 2013-11-11, accepted in 2014-10-01,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionCavernous hemangioma in the thymus is a rare presentation in mediastinal hemangiomas. The diagnosis is difficult to make promptly because both invasive and noninvasive examinations usually fail to distinguish it from other tumors of the mediastinum. Their clinical presentations depends on their size and their involvement with adjacent mediastinal structures.Case presentationWe treated a 52-year-old man with thymic cavernous hemangioma that was incidentally detected by chest radiography during a routine health check, and had been misdiagnosed as thymoma before the operation. The tumor was completely resected by thymectomy via video-assisted thoracic surgery. The pathological tissue was diagnosed as a cavernous hemangioma, and no phlebolith was observed in the center.ConclusionsWe reported this case of thymic cavernous hemangioma for its extremely rare occurrence in the thymus. The preoperative diagnosis remains a challenge both clinically and radiologically. It is still difficult to distinguish this tumor from other tumors in the thymus. Furthermore, biopsies might not result in a definitive diagnosis. Finally, surgical resection provides material for histopathologic diagnosis. To facilitate the preoperative diagnosis of such a rare tumor, more cases will need to be reported.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Shen et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. 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/2.0), 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.