Why the study?
Intrathoracic lipoma is relatively rare and clinically difficult to distinguish from liposarcoma.
Minimally invasive thoracoscopic surgery is effective for the resection and definitive histopathological diagnosis of rapidly appearing intrathoracic lipomas, allowing differentiation from liposarcomas.
Pathological confirmation via thoracoscopy aids differentiation of rare intrathoracic lipomas; leaves open standardized management for asymptomatic cases.
The occurrence of lipoma in the thoracic cavity is relatively rare, and it is clinically difficult to distinguish it from liposarcoma. We report a case of intrathoracic lipoma that was pathologically diagnosed and differentiated from liposarcoma after minimally invasive thoracoscopic tumour resection. A 35-year-old male patient without any symptoms was referred to our hospital due to an abnormal shadow on chest x-ray. Computed tomography showed a low-attenuated round-shaped mass of 3.6 cm × 2.3 cm in diameter in the left chest wall. On magnetic resonance imaging, the mass was displayed as a high, high and low signal mass on T1-weighted imaging (WI), T2WI and T2WI with fat suppression, respectively. We suspected a chest wall-type lipoma, but because it appeared in a relatively short period of time and we thought it could be liposarcoma, we performed minimally invasive thoracoscopic surgery for diagnosis and treatment. The tumour was a stalked tumour with a capsule, contiguous to the wall pleura with only a single cord-like structure. The majority of the tumour was found free in the pleural cavity. The tumour was diagnosed as a lipoma by histopathological examination.
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Hirai et al. (2022) studied this question.
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