Background: Recently a new standardized terminology in dermoscopy has been provided by a Consensus Meeting held by the Committee on Analytical Morphology of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dermatologische Forschung in Hamburg in order to be applied to further studies in this field.
Objective: In this study on 159 pigmented skin tumors including 65 melanomas, the validity of various dermoscopic criteria proposed by the Consensus Meeting for detecting melanoma was evaluated.
Methods: In each lesion, a detailed clinical and dermoscopic examination, photographic documentation of the clinical and dermoscopic appearance, surgical excision and histopathologic evaluation were performed. Statistical analyses including chi 2 statistics, logistic regression analysis and CART (classification and regression tree) analysis were applied.
Results: The diagnosis of melanoma using dermoscopy could be obtained easily, if combinations of the following criteria were observed: whitish veil, pigment network alterations (e.g. irregular pigment network, narrow pigment network, broad pigment network), irregular extensions, black dots and gray-blue areas. Interestingly, however, clinical and dermoscopic examination to detect melanomas yielded the same results, namely a sensitivity of 94%. The combined use of both methods led to an increase in the diagnostic sensitivity of 95%, whereas the combination of clinical and dermoscopic examination with logistic regression analysis of dermoscopic criteria enabled us to detect all 65 melanomas in our data set, thus providing a sensitivity of 100%. Furthermore, an algorithm for the classification of melanoma based on the evaluation of dermoscopic criteria has been constructed by CART analysis showing that the presence of a whitish veil in combination with a pigment network inevitably indicates melanoma.
Conclusion: The validity of the various dermoscopic criteria set forth by the Consensus Meeting could be demonstrated as some criteria (e.g. whitish veil, irregular pigment network, irregular extensions) were observed with a significant higher frequency in melanomas.