Clinical and imaging features of tufted angioma in children

Tufted angioma (TA) is a rare vascular tumor, and its imaging characteristics have rarely been reported. This study aimed to investigate the clinical and imaging features of TA to provide a reference for its early diagnosis.

Between March 2022 and August 2024, the clinical and imaging findings of TA, initially diagnosed based on clinical manifestations and confirmed by histopathology, were retrospectively analyzed.

The mean age of the five children was 2.2 years (range 0.6-9.4 years), including two boys and three girls. The symptoms mainly consisted of cutaneous lesions associated with erythematous skin changes. Ultrasonography showed superficial hypoechoic masses with increased echogenicity of the underlying soft tissue. On computed tomography, the lesions appeared as skin thickening and flocculent soft-tissue shadows, demonstrating striated and/or flocculent significant homogeneous enhancement on contrast-enhanced scans. All TAs showed homogeneous hyperintensity on fat-saturated T2-weighted images without significant diffusion restriction on diffusion-weighted imaging.

TA primarily occurs in infants and can arise at various body locations. Its imaging manifestations include ill-defined superficial lesions with subcutaneous adipose tissue involvement and significant enhancement, which may serve as a reference for clinical diagnosis.