The imaging looked grim. A 39-year-old woman had large, irregular masses in her liver, small nodules scattered across the lining of her abdomen, and enlarged lymph nodes near her heart. Radiologists strongly suspected a cancer that had spread across the abdominal lining, a pattern called peritoneal carcinomatosis.
A needle biopsy found no cancer at all. Instead, the mass was an inflammatory pseudotumor, a rare benign lesion made of scar-forming cells and inflammatory cells that can closely imitate malignancy on scans.
