Features of vascular dermatoscopic component in various morphological types of epidermal dysplasia

Introduction: Dermatologists of many foreign countries have been successfully using and developing dermatoscopy as a method of early diagnosis of skin tumors for three decades. It is believed that the vascular dermatoscopiccomponent is a promising criterion for the diagnosis of epidermal dysplasia of the skin and can be used for differential diagnosis. The aim of the work was to study the features of the vascular dermatoscopic component in actinic keratosis (AK), non-invasive (squamous cell carcinoma in situ-SCCis) and invasive forms of squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC).

Material and methods: 68 dermatological images were studied, including 33 cases of AK, 22 cases of SCCis and 13 cases of cSCC of different localization. Pathology of the skin is confirmed by pathologic studies in 100% of cases. The dermatoscopic examination was performed by the Heine Delta 20 dermatoscope. The evaluation of the vascular component was performed using the DermaVisionPro software.

Results: In the analysis of dermatoscopic signs, the following vascular components were revealed: red pseudo-net (64.7%), strawberry pattern (36.8%), dotted vessels (26.5%), linear vessels (11.8%), polymorphic vessels (16.2%), blood vessels of the type of glomeruli (11.8%) and red globules (5.9%). The morphological type of dysplasia AK correlated with red pseudo-network (r =0.99) and strawberry pattern (r =0.92). The SCCis correlated with blood vessels of the type of glomeruli (r =0.82) and dotted vessels (r =0.75), the cSCC correlated with polymorphic (r =0.91) and linear (r =0.68) vessels.

Conclusions: The study confirms the existing opinion on the possible effective use of the vascular dermatoscopic component as a differential diagnostic criterion for non-invasive diagnosis of epidermal dysplasia of the skin. Typical combinations of vascular dermatoscopic components for morphological types of epidermal dysplasia - AK I-III, SCCis and cSCC were determined.