Interdisciplinarity in Diagnostics of Bone Lesions

Due to substantial advances in all medical disciplines, interdisciplinary cooperation is of major relevance in modern medicine. Given the rarity of benign and malignant bone tumours, diagnosis and therapy of these lesions is especially challenging. Focusing on typical cases, it is the aim of this article to illustrate the necessity of interdisciplinary cooperation.

The scope of this article is to highlight the particular significance of interdisciplinarity in the diagnosis of bone tumours. To this end, we illustrate the interdisciplinary approach in typical clinical cases.

The article demonstrates that a combined clinico-radiological approach is essential in the diagnosis of leave-me-alone lesions, and it underlines the essential role of an interdisciplinary correlation of clinical context, radiology and pathology in the interpretation of bone tumour biopsies. It documents the experience that all clinical aspects and diagnostic findings need to be synoptically integrated in a joint interdisciplinary tumour board to eventually find the correct diagnosis.

It is generally accepted that the diagnosis of a bone tumour can often not be made by the pathologist alone but essentially requires interdisciplinary cooperation.