Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Vascular tumor
Summary
A vascular tumor is a tumor of vascular origin; a soft tissue growth that can be either benign or malignant, formed from blood vessels or lymph vessels. Examples of vascular tumors include hemangiomas, lymphangiomas, hemangioendotheliomas, Kaposi's sarcomas, angiosarcomas, and hemangioblastomas. An angioma refers to any type of benign vascular tumor.
Some vascular tumors can be associated with serious blood-clotting disorders, making correct diagnosis critical.
A vascular tumor may be described in terms of being highly vascularized, or poorly vascularized, referring to the degree of blood supply to the tumor.
Vascular tumors make up one of the classifications of vascular anomalies. The other grouping is vascular malformations. Vascular tumors can be further subclassified as being benign, borderline or aggressive, and malignant. Vascular tumors are described as proliferative, and vascular malformations as nonproliferative.
A vascular tumor typically grows quickly by the proliferation of endothelial cells. Most are not birth defects.
The most common type of benign vascular tumors are hemangiomas, most commonly infantile hemangiomas, and less commonly congenital hemangiomas.
Infantile hemangioma
Infantile hemangiomas are the most common type of vascular tumor to affect babies, accounting for 90% of hemangiomas. They are characterised by the abnormal proliferation of endothelial cells and of deviant blood vessel formation or architecture. Hypoxic stress seems to be a major trigger for this. Infantile hemangiomas are easily diagnosed, and little if any aggressive treatment is needed. They are characterised by rapid growth in the first few months, followed by spontaneous regression in early childhood.
Congenital hemangiomas are present and fully formed at birth, and only account for 2% of the hemangiomas. They do not have the postnatal phase of proliferation common to infantile hemangiomas. There are two main variants of congenital hemangioma: non-involuting, and rapidly involuting (beginning in the first year of life).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.