Vascular tumors and malformations in children, Introduction

Over the past decade, I have been amazed at the growth in the field of vascular anomalies. The recognition of vascular birthmarks as a defined area of medicine is a relatively recent event. The International Society for the Study of Vascular Anomalies (ISSVA) was founded by Drs John Mulliken and Anthony Young in the late 1970s. Mulliken and Glowacki's sentinel 1982 paper on the biologic classification of vascular anomalies further established the field, by providing clarity of nomenclature and unifying concepts that had previously been lacking.