The role of spectrophotometry in the diagnosis of melanoma

Spectrophotometry (SPT) could represent a promising technique for the diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma (CM) at earlier stages of the disease. Starting from our experience, we further assessed the role of SPT in CM early detection. During a health campaign for malignant melanoma at National Cancer Ins...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMC dermatology 2010-08, Vol.10 (1), p.5-5, Article 5
Main Authors: Ascierto, Paolo A, Palla, Marco, Ayala, Fabrizio, De Michele, Ileana, Caracò, Corrado, Daponte, Antonio, Simeone, Ester, Mori, Stefano, Del Giudice, Maurizio, Satriano, Rocco A, Vozza, Antonio, Palmieri, Giuseppe, Mozzillo, Nicola
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Adult
Aged
Care and treatment
Clinical medicine
Confidence intervals
Dermoscopy
Diagnosis
Early Diagnosis
Female
Humans
Infrared radiation
Male
Melanoma
Melanoma - diagnosis
Melanoma - epidemiology
Middle Aged
Mortality
Reproducibility of Results
Risk Factors
Sensitivity and Specificity
Skin cancer
Skin Neoplasms - diagnosis
Skin Neoplasms - epidemiology
Spectrophotometry
Spectrophotometry - methods
Spectrophotometry - standards
Young Adult
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Summary:Spectrophotometry (SPT) could represent a promising technique for the diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma (CM) at earlier stages of the disease. Starting from our experience, we further assessed the role of SPT in CM early detection. During a health campaign for malignant melanoma at National Cancer Institute of Naples, we identified a subset of 54 lesions to be addressed to surgical excision and histological examination. Before surgery, all patients were investigated by clinical and epiluminescence microscopy (ELM) screenings; selected lesions underwent spectrophotometer analysis. For SPT, we used a video spectrophotometer imaging system (Spectroshade MHT S.p.A., Verona, Italy). Among the 54 patients harbouring cutaneous pigmented lesions, we performed comparison between results from the SPT screening and the histological diagnoses as well as evaluation of both sensitivity and specificity in detecting CM using either SPT or conventional approaches. For all pigmented lesions, agreement between histology and SPT classification was 57.4%. The sensitivity and specificity of SPT in detecting melanoma were 66.6% and 76.2%, respectively. Although SPT is still considered as a valuable diagnostic tool for CM, its low accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity represent the main hamper for the introduction of such a methodology in clinical practice. Dermoscopy remains the best diagnostic tool for the preoperative diagnosis of pigmented skin lesions.
ISSN:1471-5945
1471-5945
DOI:10.1186/1471-5945-10-5