Recent advances in the application of immunohistochemical markers for the diagnosis of soft tissue tumors.

Soft tissue tumors represent a frequent source of diagnostic difficulty for surgical pathologists. Over the past 20 years, immunohistochemical studies have emerged as a powerful and helpful tool for the assessment and characterization of these lesions. Although much progress has been made in this field, the continuous realization of the relative lack of specificity and broad overlap in reactivity for the various tumor markers among these lesions has contributed to limit somewhat their usefulness and reliability in this area of tumor diagnosis. However, with the advent of new markers has come the new promise of better and more accurate distinction and characterization for these tumors. Herein we will review the current status of immunohistochemical tumor markers in the diagnosis of soft tissue neoplasms and address some of the more recently described antibodies and their relative value and limitations for the diagnosis of these tumors.