Abstract
Melanoma is an aggressive skin cancer that originates from melanocytes and, especially in the case of early-stage melanoma, is distributed adjacent to the epidermis and superficial dermis. Although early-stage melanoma can be distinguished from benign nevus via a dermoscopy, it is difficult to distinguish invasive melanoma in its early stages from in situ melanoma. Because invasive melanoma must undergo a sentinel lymph node biopsy to be diagnosed, a non-invasive method to detect the micro-invasion of early-stage melanoma is needed for dermato-oncologists. This paper proposes a novel quantitative melanoma identification method based on accurate measurements of thermal conductivity using a pen-shaped device. This method requires skin temperature data for one minute to determine the effective thermal conductivity of the skin, allowing it to distinguish melanoma lesions from healthy skin. Results suggest that effective thermal conductivity was negative for in situ melanoma. However, in accordance with tumour progression, effective thermal conductivity was larger in invasive melanoma. The proposed thermal conductivity measurement is a novel tool that detects the micro-invasion of melanoma.
Highlights
Melanoma is an aggressive skin cancer that originates from melanocytes and exhibits a malignant transformation distributed throughout the epidermis and superficial dermis, as it can spread through blood and lymphatic vessels[1]
Because it is difficult in some cases to distinguish micro-invasive melanoma from in situ melanoma using only dermoscopy[3], and it takes approximately one week to make a histological diagnosis using the skin biopsy results, a novel device that can detect dermal micro-invasion of melanoma is needed during early stages to avoid unnecessary surgery for melanoma patients[1,5]
We investigated invasive and non-invasive melanoma patients to detect the threshold of dermal invasion using thermal conductivity measurements of the skin surface
Summary
Comparison between effective thermal conductivities of lesions and healthy skin on in situ melanoma patients. The in situ melanoma group exhibited significantly lower values of effective thermal conductivity at lesions when compared to healthy skin (P = 0.0495, kl vs kh in Cases 2–6). Results of effective thermal conductivities measured on invasive melanoma patients (Cases 7–11) are shown in Table 1 and Fig. 1B. The invasive melanoma group exhibited relatively high skin surface temperatures compared to the in situ melanoma group, due to increased blood perfusion and metabolic activity from tumour growth (Table 1 and Fig. S1B). This result was consistent with those of previous studies[9,10]. The repeatability of the measurements was sufficient for detecting differences
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