Tumors of Muscular Origin

Generally speaking, tumors of muscular origin are not common. The radiological literature is limited mainly to case reports [17, 27, 37, 55, 59], and even when series of soft tissue tumors are reported, the number of muscular lesions remains low [32, 49]. In two fundamental papers based on lesions seen by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology over a 10 year period, Kransdorf reported 311 benign tumors of muscular origin (leiomyomas) out of a total of 18.677 benign soft tissue tumors, or 1.7% [31]. Among the 12 370 malignant soft tissue tumors there were 1039 leiomyosarcomas (8.4%) and 239 rhabdomyosarcomas (1.9%) [30].