Non-invasive characterization of melanoma depth at single-cell resolution

Efficient staging and management of cutaneous melanoma, one of today's deadliest skin cancers, requires non-invasive determination of tumour depth (Breslow depth). However, current imaging technologies lack the necessary contrast or penetration to measure Breslow depth.

To determine if raster-scanning optoacoustic mesoscopy (RSOM) can fill this gap in dermatology.

We used phantoms to optimize RSOM for melanoma imaging and demonstrated its capability to image melanocytes at single-cell resolution in deep tissue. We then compared RSOM's ability to measure Breslow depth against the clinical standard in a pilot study. For the phantoms studies, we compared the ability of an optimized RSOM system to measure the concentration and diameter of single melanoma cells against gold-standard microscopy methods. For the pilot clinical study, we used linear regression to compare RSOM's Breslow depth against the clinical standard, obtaining the goodness of fit (R²) and the p-value. For the pilot clinical study, we imaged nine lesions: 7 superficially spreading melanomas, 1 benign dysplastic nevus and 1 blue nevus. The average age of the patients was 56.2 ± 12.5 years. We also imaged 10 non-lesional skin areas from healthy volunteers.

By utilizing ultra-wideband frequency detection and optimized illumination wavelength, we show that RSOM achieves non-invasive imaging of melanoma at the resolution of single melanocytes, penetrating more than 3 mm into the skin. The agreement between RSOM and the standard-of-care histological assessment was R² = 0.886 (p = 0.0002) for Breslow depth determination.

RSOM provides non-invasive imaging performance that correlates with the Breslow depth determination. Further work is needed to confirm these findings and to test RSOM against other non-invasive methods.