What is heterogeneous in medical terms?
Heterogeneous refers to a structure with dissimilar components or elements, appearing irregular or variegated. For example, a dermoid cyst has heterogeneous attenuation on CT. It is the antonym for homogeneous, meaning a structure with similar components.
What does it mean when a disease is heterogeneous?
A genetic or allelic heterogeneous condition is one where the same disease or condition can be caused, or contributed to, by varying different genes or alleles. In clinical trials and statistics the concepts of homogeneous and heterogeneous populations is important.
What is a heterogeneous appearance?
Heterogeneous is a word pathologists use to describe tissue that looks very different from one area of the tissue to the next. Differences in colour, shape, and size can make a tissue look heterogeneous. Heterogeneous can be used to describe the way the tissue looks with or without a microscope.
What does homogeneous mean in medical terms?
of uniform structure or composition
Medical Definition of homogeneous : of uniform structure or composition throughout.
What is heterogeneous mass lesion?
Introduction. Soft tissue tumors are a heterogeneous group of benign and malignant lesions that develop from various nonepithelial, extraskeletal elements, including adipose tissue, smooth and skeletal muscle, tendon, cartilage, fibrous tissue, blood vessels, and lymphatic structures.
Is a heterogeneous mass cancerous?
A term that describes the differences between tumors of the same type in different patients, the differences between cancer cells within a single tumor, or the differences between a primary (original) tumor and a secondary tumor. These differences may involve the tumor’s genes and proteins.
What does homogeneous mean in ultrasound?
Organs and structures are characterized based on the amount of echoes they generate (echogenicity) and how equally distributed these echoes are in soft tissue (homogeneity).
Can benign tumors be heterogeneous?
In contrast, 91 of the 164 benign lesions (56%) were heterogeneous on T2WI. Univariate analysis showed that depth, size and heterogeneity on T2WI differed significantly between benign and malignant masses.
How do cancers become heterogeneous?
Phenotypic and functional heterogeneity arise among cancer cells within the same tumor as a consequence of genetic change, environmental differences, and reversible changes in cellular properties. Some cancers also contain a hierarchy in which tumorigenic cancer stem cells differentiate into non-tumorigenic progeny.
What causes heterogeneity?
Reasons for heterogeneity, other than clinical differences, could include methodological issues such as problems with randomisation, early termination of trials, use of absolute rather than relative measures of risk, and publication bias.
What does it mean if your uterus is heterogeneous?
The heterogeneous appearance reflects the infiltrative process of islands of heterotropic endometrial tissue that are scattered diffusely throughout the myometrium and that are poorly demarcated from the surrounding myometrium (,28,,29) (,Fig 11).
What is a heterogeneous liver?
In some patients, heterogeneous steatosis does not appear as a field but as multiple lesions that are more fatty than the rest of the liver and distributed throughout the whole of the liver parenchyma. These lesions strongly suggest liver tumours.
What is homogeneous in ultrasound?
What is a heterogeneous mass lesion?
Can a heterogeneous mass be benign?
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