Soft Tissue Pathology

For pathologists, soft tissue tumors can range from the simple, such as lipomas, to the very complex such as unusual sarcomas. Lipomas are one of the bread-and-butter diagnostic specimens received by the pathology laboratory since they are very common. It is important for a pathologist to evaluate a suspected lipoma, however, since clinically a lipoma can look very similar to a low-grade cancer (sarcoma). Sarcomas can be very challenging to diagnosis and some may require specialized studies such as cytogenetics or fluorescent in-situ hybridization (FISH) in order to attain an accurate diagnosis. The pathologists at The Pathology Group are knowledgeable in all these special studies and will determine which studies need to be performed on these different tumor types.