Role of nuclear medicine in melanoma

Melanoma is a malignant tumour of the melanocytes presenting characteristic metabolic and biological features, which remains a difficult and important issue in oncology. As a functional modality, nuclear medicine offers a variety of possibilities to assist in the clinical management of this disease. A brief survey of currently available techniques is presented for the diagnosis, staging and follow up, either by organ imaging or by using a great spectrum of tumour-seeking radiopharmaceuticals. The role of lymphoscintigraphy in melanoma is emphasized, as well as the supportive role of nuclear medicine in the surgical theater, enabling selective lymph node dissection by the sentinel node procedure and high dose regional chemotherapy by isolated limb perfusion. Although hardly used for metastatic melanoma so far, with all its tumour-seeking approaches nuclear medicine holds a therapeutic potential for this disease as well.