The presentation will reflect on a one-month period of education that the author spent with the Cleveland Clinic soft tissue pathology team. Cleveland is a US city in the state of Ohio. One of its nicknames is
“The Rock and Roll Capital of the world”, due to the fact that the term R’n’R was coined in the 1950s by
a Cleveland-based disc jockey Alan Freed. The city hosts the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, established in
1983. It is also home to the Cleveland Clinic, a multispecialty academic hospital currently ranked as the
#2 hospital by U.S. News & World Report1. In 2014, Cleveland Clinic had a total revenue of $11.63 billion, making it the #2 hospital in US on the Becker’s Hospital Review revenue list2. The author spent one
month on a UICC ICRETT fellowship in November 2016 with the Cleveland Clinic soft tissue pathology
team. The main strength of the soft tissue team is the presence of several internationally known experts
with diverse interests within the field of soft tissue and beyond, with team philosophy highlighting the
synergy of team work and individual reputation. Among various topics that were covered during the
one-month fellowship, certainly one of the most interesting was differentiation among different fibrohistiocytic neoplasms. Fibrohistiocytic tumors are among the most frequent soft tissue tumors and they
are most commonly encountered in the skin. “Fibrohistiocytic” is in fact a merely descriptive term for
cells that resemble both normal fibroblasts and histiocytes, and not a true line of differentiation3. Like
other soft tissue tumors, fibrohistiocytic neoplasms are divided into benign, intermediate and malignant
categories. In presentation, the author will reflect on the key points in the pathology diagnosis within this
category of tumors, and these are:
- being able to give a common denominator to numerous variants of benign fibrous histiocytoma
- awareness of the pitfalls in the diagnosis of dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans
- discrimination of malignant fibrohistiocytic skin-based tumors from other, more adverse cutaneous
malignancies.