Pre-surgical staging of renal cell carcinoma using imaging methods

The incidental discovery of renal tumors has become more frequent lately. As a result, a more precise preoperative characterization of such tumors is necessary to allow the selection of the best treatment for each case, such as nepron-sparing surgery, radical nephrectomy, or immunotherapy. Computed tomography has been the most used imaging method to study these tumors. Large tumors, perinephric fat invasion, multicenter tumors, vascular invasion and stage IV are all computed tomography criteria which may exclude nephron-sparing surgery as a curative therapy. Furthermore there are some tomographic pitfalls in the detection of perinephric fat invasion and tumoral nodes. In this paper, the importance and accuracy of computed tomography for renal cancer staging is evaluated. (author)