Correct and rapid diagnosis of skin tumours often requires biopsy and histopathological examination to differentiate benign lesions such as seborrhoeic keratoses or melanocytic naevi from premalignant and malignant lesions such as malignant melanoma. Particularly, to the untrained eye, any benign skin tumour-pigmented or nonpigmented-is easily mistaken for a malignant lesion. Qualified clinical...

Background: Histopathologic examination alone can be inadequate for diagnosis of certain melanocytic neoplasms. Recently, a 23-gene expression signature was clinically validated as an ancillary diagnostic test to differentiate benign nevi from melanoma. The current study assessed the performance of this test in an independent cohort of melanocytic lesions against clinically proven outcomes.Meth...

CASE REPORT A 78-year-old-woman presented with a corneal non-pigmented vascularised tumour of her left eye, of 2 months onset, but with no previous ocular disorders. Surgical excision was performed, and the histopathological study showed the lesion to be an atypical melanocytic nevus of the limbus. DISCUSSION Corneal pigmented lesions tend to occur as a result of conjunctival or sclerocorneal...

OBJECTIVES To determine if pathology review, within the context of a multidisciplinary pigmented lesion clinic, results in changes in diagnosis of melanocytic lesions and to ascertain if the change in diagnosis altered clinical management and outcome. METHODS Retrospective review of pathology reports, progress notes, and diagnoses entered in the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) Pigme...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the dermoscopic features of acral melanocytic lesions in a white population in central Italy. DESIGN Retrospective review. SETTING University dermatology department. PATIENTS Six hundred fifty-one Italian subjects, ranging in age from 6 months to 78 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES We retrospectively investigated all digital dermoscopic images of acral melanocytic l...

Blue nevi are benign melanocytic lesions located in the deeper reticular dermis, consequence of failure of melanocytic migration into the dermal-epidermal junction from the neural crest. Lesions are usually asymptomatic and solitary, but may present in a multiple or agminated (grouped) pattern. The agminated subtype is formed when bluish-pigmented lesions cluster together in a well-defined area...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the feasibility of manual segmentation by users of different backgrounds in a previously developed multifeature computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) system to classify melanocytic and non-melanocytic skin lesions based on conventional digital photographic images. METHODS In total, 347 conventional photographs of melanocytic and non-melanocytic skin lesions were retrospect...

A first aim of the project is to determine the role of c-KIT gene amplification in uveal melanocytic lesions. Since there is a targeted designed treatment directed against c-KIT (by STI571 or Imatinib), this part of the study can have important therapeutic implications for uveal melanocytic lesions. The second part of the study uses 4 FISH probes that have been proven to be of diagnostic value ...

Melanocytes in melanocytic naevi and melanomas can display great variation. The presence of nuclear pseudoinclusions (NPI) is said to be useful in the histological and cytological differential diagnosis of malignant melanoma. The prevalence and characteristics of NPI in a series of 493 naevi and 50 melanomas are described. NPI were found in 31% of adult naevi, 30% of congenital naevi from child...