ABCDE—An Evolving Concept in the Early Detection of Melanoma

Association of Skin Examination Behaviors and Thinner Nodular vs Superficial Spreading Melanoma at Diagnosis

“…Both the "ugly duckling" rule and the addition of E (for evolving) have provided important clinical warning signs to improve the recognition of NM. [31][32][33][34][35] Our findings support the importance of educating individuals on SSE practices, including thoroughness and frequency, 19,36 and highlight the need for complementary practices such as PSE for the detection of thinner NM. Physician detection of melanoma is associated with detection of thinner melanoma.…”

“…In this study, no self-recognized clinical changes of the lesion were associated with the detection of thinner NM, with the exception of patients who noticed a change in any of their moles, affirming the value of educating patients and providers regarding the outlier phenomenon and the need to seek prompt medical attention for a changing lesion. Both the “ugly duckling” rule and the addition of E (for evolving ) have provided important clinical warning signs to improve the recognition of NM . Our findings support the importance of educating individuals on SSE practices, including thoroughness and frequency, and highlight the need for complementary practices such as PSE for the detection of thinner NM.…”

Fostering transparent medical image AI via an image-text foundation model grounded in medical literature

“…5H and I show the weights of the trained linear classifier corresponding to the concepts used in the bottleneck layer. For the Melanoma target, the results are consistent with the ABCDEs of melanoma [46], which define easily recognizable features-namely, asymmetry, border irregularity, color variation, diameter, and evolution-that differentiate malignant melanomas from benign melanocytic nevi. From the concept weights obtained, all concepts that coincide with the ABCDEs get a positive weight as expected, indicating a positive correlation with the melanoma prediction target.…”

Melanoma detection using smartphone and multimode hyperspectral imaging

“…There have been many attempts to extract ABCD information using automated image segmentation and the development of proxy measurements for border irregularity and color. [20] Asymmetry and diameter measurements are relatively straightforward measurements if there is some calibration reference such as a ruler measurement of the lesion, or a distance positioning reference for the imaging device.…”