Preoperative Melanoma Thickness Determination by 20-MHz Sonography and Digital Videomicroscopy in Combination

Seven-point checklist for dermatoscopy: Performance during 10 years of prospective surveillance of patients at increased melanoma risk

“…These observations are sustained by previous publications showing similar results when comparing thin and thick melanomas. [33][34][35][36] In conclusion, the 7-point checklist for dermatoscopy was less sensitive but highly specific in this prospective surveillance study of patients at high risk in comparison with previous retrospective analyses. However, complementary information (eg, derived from anamnestic data or digital dermatoscopy) helped to identify 48 (38%) additional melanomas and, therefore, clearly increased the sensitivity.…”

High-resolution color-Doppler ultrasound for the study of skin growths

“…This is in agreement with literature data that have amply demonstrated that the vascular density detected within the tumor by color Doppler directly correlates with the metastatic potential. Indeed, in particular in the case of melanomas, the histopathologically measured thickness (Breslow index), which is the most important prognostic factor [4], can be accurately and noninvasively measured using ultrasound [1,6,[9][10][11][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Lassau et al have indeed reported that the thickness of the tumor indicated by the Breslow index, as well as the vascular density of the tumor identified by color Doppler, is significantly correlated with metastatic potential and dissemination of melanomas [19,20].…”

“…It allows reasonable discrimination between diseased tissue and healthy skin tissue, of dermatologic and non-dermatologic origins, hypovascular and hypervascular lesions. It can also show critical information otherwise invisible to the naked eye of a clinician, including, for example, depth and activity of skin lesions [15,22,31,32]. Therefore, it is clear that ultrasound examinations of the skin should be performed and interpreted by a radiologist with a high level of expertise and training in skin ultrasound, with a standardized technique to avoid diagnostic errors.…”

High-frequency 30-MHz sonography in preoperative assessment of tumor thickness of primary melanoma: usefulness in determination of surgical margin and indication for sentinel lymph node biopsy

“…Good correlations between the sonometric and histopathologic thickness have been reported. 1,[8][9][10][11][12] Most of these sonographic studies used 13-or 20-MHz probes. Salmhofer et al 13 found that loss of skin tension after excision led to an increase in the measured tumor thickness because of spherical retraction of the specimen, but subsequent fi xation, dehydration, and embedding reversed this effect, so that altogether, histopathologically assessed tumor thickness was only slightly lower than ultrasound-derived in vivo thickness before excision.…”