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Lipomatous Skin Tag

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Dr. P here with a patient, 47-year-old man,

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3 00:00:03,710 --> 00:00:06,529 complaining of pain when walking.

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His pain is on the bottom of the foot.

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Well, no joke.

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Here is the sagittal fat-suppressed image.

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There is a mass that fat suppresses.

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Here's the T2-weighted image, and the majority

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of the mass matches the signal intensity of fat.

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But it does have some septa inside.

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And then finally, the simple

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coronal T1-weighted image.

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No, that is not a lipoma.

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That is a normal fat pad.

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There's the rest of the normal fat pad.

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This is often misdiagnosed as a fatty lesion.

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But here is our mass.

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It looks like a giant gelatin

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capsule, but it isn't.

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It is a skin tag composed

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almost exclusively of fat.

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So, the communication with the

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heel pad is readily obvious.

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So what is the differential diagnosis here?

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Well, it could be a giant lipoma, but it does

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have some excessive weird septa inside, and so

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you have to consider something that's atypical.

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And we lump these into the category of

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atypical lipomatous tumors, or ALTs.

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And within the spectrum of ALTs are simple

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lipomas with some atypicality to them, so

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they're not so simple, lipomas with atypicality,

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such as a few extra septations, a few thick

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septations, a little bit of enhancement.

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Maybe a little bit of calcification.

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Large size.

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Then we get into, uh, something

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called the spindle cell lipoma, which

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we used to misname atypical lipoma.

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I don't use that term anymore.

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I use spindle cell lipoma.

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Those usually don't occur

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in the distal extremities.

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They may be associated with

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myasthenia gravis and thymoma.

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And then finally, the well-

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differentiated, slow-growing liposarcoma.

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Which sometimes can be very

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difficult to differentiate

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from the lipoma that has some atypicality to it.

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There's one other lesion that I'd like

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you to be aware of called hibernoma.

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Hibernomas are tumors of brown fat.

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They like the nape of the neck, and if you put

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your hand over them, they're a little bit warm.

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They will be hot on positron emission tomography.

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So this lesion was excised and proved to

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be a lipoma, a giant skin tag, and it just

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happened to have a few extra septations within.

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Simple diagnosis.

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Good case for arrest.

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Dr. P out.

Report

Faculty

Stephen J Pomeranz, MD

Chief Medical Officer, ProScan Imaging. Founder, MRI Online

ProScan Imaging

Tags

Neoplastic

Musculoskeletal (MSK)

MSK

MRI

Idiopathic

Foot & Ankle

Bone & Soft Tissues

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