Lymph Nodes

Copyright © 2013 David Aranovich et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Background. Visceral metastatic spread of ocular melanomamost commonly occurs via hematogenous route to the liver. Lymphatic spread of ocular melanoma into abdominal lymph nodes has not been reported previously. Case Presentation. A 47-year-old man with a history of ocular melanoma presented with a soft tissue mass on CT scan. The mass encased the portal structures of the hepaticoduodenal ligament. Image-guided biopsy revealed it to be a metastatic melanoma to lymph nodes. The patient underwent surgery with the intent to prolong disease-free survival. On final pathological examination, two lymph nodes were found harboring metastatic melanoma.Conclusion. Extrahepatic lymphatic intra-abdominal spread of ocular melanoma is not impossible. Since this mode of spread is rare, the oncologic significance of surgical resection of isolated intra-abdominal nodal with metastatic ocular melanoma is difficult to determine at the present time. 1. Background Ocular melanoma is the most frequent primary tumor of the eye. It arises from the neural crest-derived pigmented uveal epitheliumof the eye in 97%of the cases, and in the remainin