Localized Castleman disease in retroperitoneum: newly discovered features by multi-detector helical CT.

OBJECTIVE: We describe CT features of our three cases with localized Castleman disease in the retroperitoneum and review literature. Besides those CT features, which have been reported before, we mainly present some newly discovered CT findings of the disease. These new CT findings include the sign of peripheral 'rim-like' enhancement at the early phase of an enhanced CT scan, a higher ratio of the left sided retroperitoneal location to the right side and the presence of local peritoneal thickening around the lesion. In addition, the feeding artery of the lesion is more visually pronounced than ever before by a 16-detector CT scanner.

CONCLUSION: After reviewing the literature and comparing with their histological findings, we suggest these newly discovered findings are relatively characteristic CT features of the disease. Moreover, multi-detector helical CT can now show more details of the disease than ever before.