Marchesini Renato, Bono Aldo, Carrara Mauro
Fondazione Istituto Nazionale Tumori, Medical Physics Unit, Via Venezian 1, I-20133 Milan, Italy.
J Biomed Opt. 2009 Jan-Feb;14(1):014027. doi: 10.1117/1.3080140.
The purpose of this study is to determine the role of melanin in the various steps of progression of melanocytic neoplasia. To this aim, we perform a retrospective analysis on 1671 multispectral images of in vivo pigmented skin lesions previously recruited in the framework of a study focused on the computer-assisted diagnosis of melanoma. The series included 288 melanomas in different phases of progression, i.e., in situ, horizontal and vertical growth phase invasive melanomas, 424 dysplastic nevi, and other 957 melanocytic lesions. Analysis of the absorbance spectra in the different groups shows that the levels of eumelanin and pheomelanin increase and decrease, respectively, from dysplastic nevi to invasive melanomas. In both cases, the trend of melanin levels is associated to the progression from dysplastic nevi to vertical growth phase melanomas, reflecting a possible hierarchy in the natural history of the early phases of the disease. Our results suggest that diffuse reflectance spectroscopy used to differentiate eumelanin and pheomelanin in in vivo lesions is a promising technique useful to develop better strategies for the characterization of various melanocytic lesions, for instance, by monitoring melanin in a time-lapse study of a lesion that was supposed to be benign.
本研究的目的是确定黑色素在黑素细胞肿瘤进展的各个阶段中所起的作用。为此，我们对1671张体内色素沉着皮肤病变的多光谱图像进行了回顾性分析，这些图像先前是在一项聚焦于黑色素瘤计算机辅助诊断的研究框架内收集的。该系列包括处于不同进展阶段的288例黑色素瘤，即原位、水平和垂直生长阶段的侵袭性黑色素瘤，424例发育异常痣，以及其他957例黑素细胞病变。对不同组的吸收光谱分析表明，从发育异常痣到侵袭性黑色素瘤，真黑素和褐黑素的水平分别升高和降低。在这两种情况下，黑色素水平的变化趋势与从发育异常痣到垂直生长阶段黑色素瘤的进展相关，反映了该疾病早期自然史中可能存在的等级关系。我们的结果表明，用于区分体内病变中真黑素和褐黑素的漫反射光谱法是一种很有前景的技术，有助于制定更好的策略来表征各种黑素细胞病变，例如，通过在对一个原本被认为是良性的病变进行延时研究中监测黑色素。
