Pulmonary ground-glass opacity: computed tomography features, histopathology and molecular pathology

Abstract

The incidence of pulmonary ground-glass opacity (GGO) lesions is increasing as a result of the widespread use of multislice spiral computed tomography (CT) and the low-dose CT screening for lung cancer detection. Besides benign lesions, GGOs can be a specific type of lung adenocarcinomas or their preinvasive lesions. Evaluation of pulmonary GGO and investigation of the correlation between CT imaging features and lung adenocarcinoma subtypes or driver genes can be helpful in confirming the diagnosis and in guiding the clinical management. Our review focuses on the pathologic characteristics of GGO detected at CT, involving histopathology and molecular pathology.

Keywords: Ground-glass opacity (GGO); Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog (KRAS); anaplastic lymphoma kinase gene (ALK); computed tomography (CT); driver genes; epidermal growth factor receptor gene (EGFR); pathology.