Abstract
In this work, Raman and autofluorescence spectroscopy in the near-infrared region has been used for examining amelanotic melanoma as the most dangerous type of malignant melanoma. There were 9 patients with amelanotic melanoma, 60 with pigmented melanoma and 120 with basal cell carcinoma enrolled in this study. We studied 9 amelanotic melanoma cases to differentiate them from basal cell carcinoma (n = 120) and pigmented malignant melanoma (n = 60) using portable spectroscopy setup with laser excitation source at 785 nm and low-cost spectrometer. The spectra of the different tumor type were classified using projection on the latent structure analysis with 10-Fold cross-validation. The results of the tumor classification were presented using box-plot diagrams and ROC analysis. We obtained 0.53 and 0.88 ROC AUCs for distinguishing amelanotic melanoma versus (1) pigmented melanoma and (2) basal cell carcinoma respectively based on the joint autofluorescence and Raman spectroscopy analysis that allowed one to diagnose amelanotic melanoma as true melanoma but no basal cell carcinoma.
Highlights
Melanoma is one of the most aggressive skin malignancies that caused the highest number of deaths of the all cases of skin cancer due to its metastatic character
near-infrared region (NIR) (785 nm) laser radiation passes through the bandpass filter (BPF), which cuts off the Raman component of the optical fiber
We performed the classification of the Amelanotic melanoma (AMM) versus PMM and BCC cases
Summary
Melanoma is one of the most aggressive skin malignancies that caused the highest number of deaths of the all cases of skin cancer due to its metastatic character. In 2020, 324 635 new cases of melanoma incidence and 57 043 deaths from melanoma were registered worldwide that is significantly higher in comparison with the last years [1]. The ABCD algorithm is basic diagnostic method for melanoma detection at the preliminary stage worldwide based on the following features: asymmetry (A), border irregularity (B), color (C) variation and diameter (D). Atypical morphological features of malignant melanoma (MM) complicate the detecting melanoma at the early stages that leads to the untimely treatment. Amelanotic melanoma (AMM) is one of the most dangerous melanoma types accounted for about 2–8% of all melanomas [2, 3]. AMM has a variety of clinical appearances and partial or complete pigment absence
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