Michelson Diagnostics: Imaging Reveals Changes in Blood Vessel Growth in Deadly Melanoma Skin Cancer

London (ots/PRNewswire) -

A new clinical study has shown that Dynamic Optical Coherence
Tomography imaging of melanomas (D-OCT) reveals changes to the blood
vessels that correlate with the depth of invasion of the melanoma.
Researchers believe this could lead to a new faster method of rapidly
assessing how dangerous a given melanoma is.

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/791553/Michelson_Diagnost
ics_early_stage_melanoma.jpg )

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/791552/Michelson_Diagnost
ics_advanced_melanoma.jpg )

A more rapid assessment of the risk would potentially allow
patients with more serious invasive disease access to the right
treatment more directly, doing away with delays inherent in the
traditional diagnosis.

The technique may also lead to reducing the number of patients
with less aggressive tumours receiving sentinel lymph node biopsies,
an expensive in-patient procedure which sometimes results in
unpleasant long-term side-effects.

The clinical study was published in the November issue of
Experimental Dermatology and looked at the blood vessel shapes in OCT
images of 127 melanomas at a variety of states of disease
progression, collected at four leading European dermatology groups
(University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, General Hospital Augsburg,
University of Copenhagen and Collegium Medicum Berlin). The device
used was Michelson Diagnostics' VivoSight OCT scanner which has
regulatory clearance in Europe, USA and Australia for clinical use
imaging skin. It was equipped with Dynamic OCT software that detects
and displays the tiny blood vessels in the skin and the tumour.

Lead author Dr Nathalie de Carvalho (University of Modena and
Reggio Emilia, Italy) explained:

"Cancers grow their own blood vessel network to supply oxygen and
nutrients. We analysed the shapes of the vessels in the OCT images of
melanomas and correlated the frequency of different shapes with the
Breslow depths (the thickness of the tumours, measured from biopsy
samples). We found that certain vessel shapes appeared much more
frequently in thicker tumours. The vessels grown by the tumour seem
to grow more chaotically and become more malformed as the cancer
progresses."

The Breslow depth is already used to assess the progress of the
disease from early stages to serious metastatic disease, but it takes
time for the biopsy results to come back from the laboratory. This
new imaging approach may provide a short-cut to more quickly identify
advanced metastatic melanomas so that patients can be fast-tracked to
the right treatment.

Professor Julia Welzel (General Hospital Augsburg, Germany) said:
"Our goal with this work is to help develop a faster, more efficient
and less invasive diagnostic and treatment pathway for melanoma.
Patients with advanced disease should get aggressive treatment as
quickly as possible; also those with early-stage melanomas should
not have to undergo expensive invasive Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy
operations if their melanoma is reliably confirmed as very low-risk.
We believe Dynamic OCT imaging could help with these goals and the
results of this study are very encouraging. The next stage of our
work is to analyse the link between vessel shapes and the actual
degree of metastasis of the melanomas in a larger cohort, and not
just the Breslow depth."

Jon Holmes, CEO of Michelson Diagnostics, said: "This very
exciting result shows for the first time that VivoSight OCT imaging
may have a powerful future role in the clinical pathway for
melanoma."

Please find full paper here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/exd.13783

De Carvalho N, Welzel J, Schuh S, Themstrup L, Ulrich M, Jemec GB,
Holmes J, Kaleci S, Chester J, Bigi L, Ciardo S. The vascular
morphology of melanoma is related to Breslow index: an in vivo study
with dynamic optical coherence tomography. Experimental dermatology.
2018 Sep 15.

For more About Michelson Diagnostics' VivoSight OCT scanner go to
http://www.vivosight.com

Contact Details:

In the UK and rest of world:

Michelson Diagnostics:

e: info@vivosight.com

t: +44(0)20-8308-1695

In USA:

e: info.us@vivosight.com

t: +1(408)504-7391

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