The performance of ultrasound for differentiation of infantile fibrosarcoma and soft tissue hemangioma

Objective To investigate the differential performance of ultrasound between infantile fibrosarcoma(IFS) and soft tissue hemangioma. Methods The retrospective study was conducted from January 2012 to January 2019 in Beijing Children′s Hospital, Capital Medical University. A total of 16 patients with IFS were consecutively collected as IFS group, and 26 consecutive patients with soft tissue hemangioma (hemangioma group) were selected for comparison according to the tumor size of IFS. All the final diagnosis got confirmed by pathological analysis. The ultrasonographic features of IFS and hemangioma were compared and analyzed, and after weighting on the basis of the dominance ration (OR), the ultrasonic features with diagnostic value were used to establish the prediction equation. Then, the differential performance of every feature and the prediction equation was evaluated via the ROC analysis. Results There were differences in the lesion echo, margin and blood flow characteristics between IFS group and hemangioma group (P=0.013, 0.002, 0.005), the area under the ROC (AUC) of applying every ultrasonic feature with diagnostic value for differentiation were 0.695, 0.740, and 0.700, respectively. Benefiting from the employment of the prediction equation, the AUC was improved to 0.887 with a sensitivity of 81.3% and a specificity of 96.2%, which were better than the diagnosis by any single feature (P=0.017, 0.035, 0.003). Conclusions Ultrasound can be utilized to discriminate infantile fibrosarcoma from soft tissue hemangioma. The use of prediction equation can further improve the differential performance with higher clinical value. Key words: Ultrasonography; Infantile fibrosarcoma; Hemangioma; Children