Lymphangiomas are benign lesions of vascular origin that show lymphatic differentiation. They occur in many anatomic locations and may have a pediatric or adult clinical presentation. Most (95%) occur in the neck and axillary regions; the remaining 5% are located in the mesentery, retroperitoneum, abdominal viscera, lung, and mediastinum [1]. Lymphangiomatosis is a rare disease with multifocal lymphatic proliferation that typically presents during childhood and involves multiple pa-renchymal organs including the lung, liver, spleen, bone, and skin. Because lymphangio-mas present across a wide age range of patient ages and occur in many sites, they are associated with a broad spectrum of clinical and radiologic manifestations.
This article summarizes our experience with 107 cases of abdominal lymphangio-mas (58 mesenteric, 11 retroperitoneal, five pancreatic, nine splenic, eight colonic, eight small intestinal, two renal, one hepatic, one hepatosplenic, one biliary, one adrenal, one bladder, and one ovarian) accessioned in the radiologic pathology archive of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology over a 22-year period. The purpose of this essay is to describe and illustrate the imaging features of abdominal lymphangiomas with pathologic correlation.