Isolated implant metastasis in chest wall due to seeding of transpleurally placed PTBD catheter tract in a case of hilar cholangiocarcinoma.

Percutaneous transhepatic biliary drainage (PTBD) catheter site metastasis in cases of cholangiocarcinoma is reported sporadically. But it is unusual to see left-sided tumour metastasising to the right PTBD catheter site. Metastasis, in general, has a poor prognosis, but recurrence along the catheter tract in the absence of other systemic diseases can be a different scenario altogether. To date, there is no consensus on the management of this form of metastasis. But carefully selected patients can benefit from aggressive surgical resection. We report a case of a young patient with isolated chest wall metastasis 1 year after resection of left-sided hilar cholangiocarcinoma. The metastasis was resected and, on pathological analysis, was confirmed to be due to implantation of malignant cells along the tract of the PTBD catheter placed via a transpleural route. © BMJ Publishing Group Ltd (unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2017. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted.