Giant congenital melanocytic nevus is usually defined as a melanocytic lesion present at birth that will reach a diameter ≥ 20 cm in adulthood. Its incidence is estimated in <1:20,000 newborns. Despite its rarity, this lesion is important because it may associate with severe complications such as malignant melanoma, affect the central nervous system (neurocutaneous melanosis), and have major ps...

A multistep genetic model of tumorigenesis, based on genetic alterations in benign and primary malignant lesions, has been proposed for neoplasms such as colonic carcinoma. However, evidence for a similar genetic progression in melanoma has relied heavily on findings in cultured lesions or metastases. We have investigated every autosomal arm for loss of heterozygosity in 41 primary cutaneous me...

Birthmarks in newborns are common sources of parental concern. Although most treatment recommendations are based on expert opinion, limited evidence exists to guide management of these conditions. Large congenital melanocytic nevi require evaluation for removal, whereas smaller nevi may be observed for malignant changes. With few exceptions, benign birthmarks (e.g., dermal melanosis, hemangioma...

BACKGROUND Spitz nevus is a benign melanocytic lesion sometimes mistakenly diagnosed clinically as melanoma. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to evaluate in vivo reflectance-mode confocal scanning laser microscopy (CSLM) aspects of globular Spitz nevi and to correlate them with those of surface microscopy and histopathology. METHODS A total of 6 Spitz nevi, with globular aspects on epiluminescence obs...

BACKGROUND Deep penetrating nevus is a recently described variant of melanocytic nevi with clinical and histopathological features that may be confused with malignant melanoma, blue nevus, pigmented Spitz nevus, or congenital melanocytic nevus. We report a case with linear arrangement of multiple deep penetrating nevi. To our knowledge, such presentation has never been reported in the literatur...

A 61-year-old woman, with a lifelong history of a giant congenital melanocytic nevus in the occipital region with secondary development of giant melanoma is presented. Surgical excision was performed, and the histopathological evaluation confirmed the diagnosis of Giant Malignant Melanoma (GMM) with a maximum tumour thickness of 16 mm. Nowadays, there is tremendous uncertainty regarding how gia...

A 16-year-old girl presented with general skin tanning, multiple dark melanocytic nevi and an enlarging nevus in her left groin following self-injections of Melanotan 2 and attending a UV tanning studio. She had been referred by her GP who was concerned that some of the darkened nevi were potentially malignant.

background spitz nevus is an infrequent acquired melanocytic nevus. there is still a challenge for dermatopathologists in distinguishing spitz nevus from malignant melanoma particularly in adults since there is no immunohistochemistry or molecular markers which differentiate spitz nevus from melanoma. objectives the aim of this study is to make clear what clinico-histopathological features of s...

Acquired melanocytic lesions resembling malignant melanoma have been described in all major categories of Epidermolysis bullosa and referred to as "Epidermolysis bullosa nevi''. They easily induce to diagnostic error, although no malignant transformation has been reported. We report the development of a large acquired melanocytic nevus at a site of recurrent blisters in a 5-year-old child with ...

We describe a fully automated system for the classification of acral volar melanomas. We used a total of 213 acral dermoscopy images (176 nevi and 37 melanomas). Our automatic tumor area extraction algorithm successfully extracted the tumor in 199 cases (169 nevi and 30 melanomas), and we developed a diagnostic classifier using these images. Our linear classifier achieved a sensitivity (SE) of ...