Original title: Giant retroperitoneal dedifferentiated liposarcoma with intraperitoneal extension: A case report
Kamal Hlioui, Loubna Messari, Fatma El Mabrouk, Ouijdane Zamani +4 · September 2026
Some rare cancers grow silently deep inside the belly until they become huge. This happened to a 66-year-old woman with a giant liposarcoma, a cancer that starts in fat tissue. Doctors examined her using three kinds of body scans: ultrasound, CT, and MRI. These scans showed a massive tumor with fat, solid parts, and fluid pockets extending through her abdomen. The images also guided a needle biopsy, where doctors took a small tissue sample to test in a lab. The tests confirmed it was a dedifferentiated liposarcoma, an aggressive cancer type. Because the tumor wrapped closely around major abdominal blood vessels, surgeons could not safely cut it out immediately. Instead, she was sent to a specialist team for systemic chemotherapy.
Imagine finding a lump in your garden soil. At first you think it's just a rock, but as you dig, you realize it's a huge, irregular boulder with both soft clay and hard stone sections. You bring in different tools—a shovel, a pickaxe, and a metal detector—to figure out what it's made of and how deep it goes. In this paper, doctors used ultrasound, CT, and MRI to examine a fatty tumor in a woman's abdomen, revealing its size, composition, and that it had spread into the abdominal cavity, which helped them decide it was too risky to remove surgically.
This case shows how a rare, slow-growing cancer can hide until it becomes life-threatening. For doctors, it underscores the need for multiple imaging techniques to spot these tumors early. For patients, it means that abdominal pain and a lump should never be ignored, because catching it sooner could make surgery possible.
The abstract does not report treatment outcomes or follow-up data, so it does not establish how the patient responded to chemotherapy or her long-term prognosis. As a single case report, it cannot generalize to all patients with retroperitoneal liposarcoma.
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Giant retroperitoneal dedifferentiated liposarcoma with intraperitoneal extension: A case report — Kamal Hlioui, Loubna Messari, Fatma El Mabrouk et al. — Radiology case reports — doi:10.1016/j.radcr.2026.08.028
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.