John Libbey Eurotext




The seven features for melanoma: a new dermoscopic algorithm for the diagnosis of malignant melanma
European Journal of Dermatology. Volume 9, Number 4, 303-8, June 1999, Cas clinique
Free Article
Author(s) : V. Dal Pozzo, C. Benelli, E. Roscetti
Summary : The clinical diagnosis of melanoma has a mean sensitivity of 67%, dermoscopy or dermatoscopy is a non invasive technique which improves this sensitivity. Our purpose was to create a simple dermoscopic method for the diagnosis of melanoma useful in daily office practice. For this reason a training set of 218 cutaneous pigmented lesions was used and scored for 16 dermoscopic features: for each feature sensitivity, specificity and statistical significance were evaluated. The results were used to create a simple dermoscopic diagnostic method of only seven dermoscopic features (7FFM). The method was used to evaluate a test set of 713 pigmented skin lesions consecutively observed. The diagnostic dermoscopic method developed gave a sensitivity of 94.6%, a specificity of 85.5% and an efficiency of 87.6%. Our method improves the sensitivity in the diagnosis of melanoma and can be used for the screening of pigmented skin lesions.
Keywords : cutaneous neoplasms, dermoscopy, dermatoscopy, epiluminescence microscopy, melanoma, skin tumors.

The seven features for melanoma: a new dermoscopic algorithm for the diagnosis of malignant melanma