Subcutaneous tumor seeding following needle core biopsy of hepatocellular carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary hepatic tumor and one of the most common cancers worldwide. At present, there are two widely used and accepted methods for obtaining diagnostic material for establishing the likelihood of malignancy in a hepatic mass, namely fine-needle aspiration (FNA) cytology and needle core biopsy (NCB). In recent years, however, tumor cell seeding along the needle tract has been shown to be a risk associated with using these procedures to obtain a pathologic diagnosis. We report a case of a patient who presented with a nodule in the anterior abdominal wall at the expected location of the previous NCB tract. FNA biopsy of the abdominal wall lesion confirmed the presence of malignant cells consistent with HCC. The finding of tumor seeding within a NCB tract raises the question of the role of NCB in the diagnostic workup of focal liver lesions.