Imaging Features And Progress Of Osteosarcoma

Osteosarcoma is the most common malignant bone tumor. Its clinical characteristics include high morbidity in adolescents, high malignancy, poor treatment effect, and so on. Improvement of the treatment effect of the disease and the survival rate of patients depends mainly on early detection and treatment of lesions. Imaging technologies including X-ray, CT, MR, ECT bone scan, ultrasonography, angiography, PET-CT etc. play a vital role in the diagnosis of osteosarcoma. The imaging features of osteosarcoma include damage and hardening of the bone, soft tissue mass, onion-like and radial periosteal reaction, Codeman’s triangle, cartilage destruction, tumor of bone formation and metastasis, and the diagnosis is comparatively definite with using imaging technologies.Nonconventional subtype of osteosarcoma is classified into seven subtypes: telangiectatic-, small cell, low-grade central, secondary, paraosteal-, and periosteal type. Imaging features of each type are different, and the definite diagnosis relies on clinical characteristics and pathology results to a large extent. Moreover, osteosarcoma sometimes occurs in some rare locations, and it is difficult for the diagnosis of these lesions. However, the common appearance in almost all the osteosarcomas is ossified tissuse, which plays an important role in diagnosis, providing information for the differential diagnosis. Different imaging methods have different respective characteristics. We should reasonably select them according to concrete conditions of osteosarcoma in order to promote the level of diagnosis and to improve the clinical treatments.