الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Diagnosis of pigmented skin lesions is often a matter of considerable debate even among histopathologists. Dermatoscopy can be viewed as the practical link of histopathology with clinical dermatology. Like clinical dermatology, dermatoscopy works parallel to the skin surface and perpendicular to the histologic plane; like the histopathology, thus it allows the viewing of structures not discernible by the naked eye. This study included 50 patients with pigmented skin lesions. They were examined clinically, dermatoscopically and histopatholgically, aiming at finding the efficacy of dermatoscopy in their diagnosis. Our obtained results, by histopathology, showed that there were 11 cases of benign nevi, 8 cases of post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, 5 cases of seborrheic keratosis, 2 cases for (freckles, actinic lichen, actinic keratosis and pigmented fibroepithelial polyp) and one case for melasma, Lentigo simplex and papular mucinosis. The remaining 6 cases were reported to be malignant melanoma (2 cases), basal cell carcinoma (2 cases), mycosis fungoides (1 case) and Kaposi sarcoma (1 case). This study showed that dermatoscopic evaluation has an important role in the diagnosis of benign pigmented skin lesions and avoiding the need of excision or biopsy. It also helps in the diagnosis of malignant melanoma and basal cell carcinoma with high degree of accuracy when compared with histopathologic examination. Diagnostic accuracy of dermatoscopy in determining the skin lesion to be benign or malignant was 96 %. Our study reported that the specificity and the positive predictive value of dermatoscopy in diagnosis of malignant pigmented skin lesions were 100% in spite of the limited number of the studied cases which should be more in future studies. The sensitivity of dermatoscopy was reported to be 66.67% in the same field, while the negative predictive value was found to be 95.65%. This study also revealed that the percent of patients compliant with the dermatoscopic examination was 92.3%. |