Clinicopathological study of soft tissue tumors

Background: Soft tissue includes supportive connective tissue of various organs and other nonepithelial, extra skeletal structures. Soft tissue includes the fibrous tissue, adipose tissue, skeletal muscle and smooth muscle tissue, peripheral nervous tissue and vascular endothelial tissue.Objectives: To study the incidence of soft tissue tumors in our institute. To study the clinicopathological correlation of soft tissue tumors with respect to incidence of age, sex, site distribution & histopathological types of soft tissue neoplasms. Materials and Methods: Prospective study conducted in the Department of Pathology, Vijayanagar Institute of Medical Sciences, Ballari, Karnataka. The study evaluated all the soft tissue tumors received between January 2017 to june 2018. Method of statistics used was descriptive analysis. All the specimens were fixed in formalin and processed through paraffin wax embedding method. Sections were cut at 5 micrometer thickness and stained by Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stain. All tumors were examined under light microscope and classified as per WHO classification. Result: Out of 98 cases of soft tissue tumors, 90.8% were benign, 3.06% were intermediate and 6.12% were malignant. Male to female ratio was 1.04:1. Most common sites were extremities (64.2%) followed by head and neck (21.4%).Of all benign lesions, the commonest was lipoma (37.7%) followed by hemangioma (22.4%). Other benign tumors include fibroblastic (3.06%), fibro-histiocytic (2.04%) and pericytic tumors (1.02%). Intermediate grade soft tissue tumors include 2 cases (2.04%) of well differentiated liposarcoma and 1 case (1.02%) inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor. Malignant tumors were pleomorphic liposarcoma (1.02%), fibrosarcoma (2.04%), monophasic synovial sarcoma (1.02%) and undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma (2.04%). Conclusion: Benign soft tissue tumors outnumbered malignant tumors. A thorough clinical history, gross, and light microscopic evaluation of hematoxylin and eosin stained sections are fundamental aspects in the diagnosis of soft tissue tumors. The clinicopathological evaluation is still the gold standard for the diagnosis of soft tissue neoplasms.