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Congenital melanocytic nevi carry a risk for malignant transformation into melanoma, therefore early detection of suspicious features is crucial to reduce mortality rates. Dermoscopy improves the early detection of melanoma while reducing the number of unnecessary excisions of benign pigmented skin lesions. Dermoscopically, congenital melanocytic nevi are often characterized by the presence of a cobblestone pattern, but to date, little is known about the dermoscopic features of acral congenital melanocytic nevi. We report an acral congenital melanocytic nevus typified by the presence of three different dermoscopic patterns that are commonly seen in acquired melanocytic nevi of palms and soles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the case of a 30-year-old woman who developed two primary melanomas on her left lower extremity where atypical melanocytic skin lesions were seen in a quadrant or segmented distribution. She was diagnosed with a quadrant or segmental atypical nevus syndrome. Surgical excision of the nevi is impractical because it may not save the patient from the development of de novo melanoma within the affected site. Patients benefit from digital dermoscopic follow-up.

We describe a fully automated system for the classification of acral volar melanomas. We used a total of 213 acral dermoscopy images (176 nevi and 37 melanomas). Our automatic tumor area extraction algorithm successfully extracted the tumor in 199 cases (169 nevi and 30 melanomas), and we developed a diagnostic classifier using these images. Our linear classifier achieved a sensitivity (SE) of 100%, a specificity (SP) of 95.9%, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.993 using a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy (81.1% SE, 92.1% SP; considering 14 unsuccessful extraction cases as false classification). In addition, we developed three pattern detectors for typical dermoscopic structures such as parallel ridge, parallel furrow, and fibrillar patterns. These also achieved good detection accuracy as indicated by their AUC values: 0.985, 0.931, and 0.890, respectively. The features used in the melanoma–nevus classifier and the parallel ridge detector have significant overlap.Journal of Investigative Dermatology (2008) 128, 2049–2054; doi:10.1038/jid.2008.28; published online 6 March 2008 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]