Skin Cancer

The prominent nitric oxide (NO) donor [Ru(terpy)(bdqi)NO](PF 6 ) 3 has been synthesized and evaluated with respect to noteworthy biological effects due to its NO photorelease, including vascular relaxation and melanoma cell culture toxicity. The potential for delivering NO in therapeutic quantities is tenable since the nitrosyl ruthenium complex (NRC) must first reach the "target tissue" and then release the NO upon stimulus. In this context, NRC-loaded lipid carriers were developed and characterized to further explore its topical administration for applications such as skin cancer treatment. NRC-loaded solid lipid nanoparticles (SLN) and nanostructured lipid carriers were prepared via the microemulsification method, with average diameters of 275 ± 15 nm and 211 ± 31 nm and zeta potentials of −40.7 ± 10.4 mV and −50.0 ± 7.5 mV, respectively. In vitro kinetic studies of NRC release from nanoparticles showed sustained release of NRC from the lipid carriers and illustrated the influence of the release medium and the lyophilization process. Stability studies showed that NO is released from NRC as a function of temperature and time and due to skin contact. The encapsulation of NRC in SLN followed by its lyophilization, significantly improved the complex stability. Furthermore, of particular interest was the fact that in the NO photorelease study, the NO release from the NRC-loaded SLN was approximately twice that of just NRC in solution. NRC-loaded SLN performs well enough at releasing and protecting NO degradation in vitro that it is a promising carrier for topical delivery of NO.

IntroductIon The hand, described as "window to the brain" by Immanuel Kant, [1] is a highly functional unit of the human body. Upper extremity tumors (UETs) may worsen hand functions. Treatment of hand tumors may be complicated, as the hand contains bones, muscles, nerves, and vessels in close proximity. UETs show a large degree of benign behavior. The most common benign tumors encountered during practice are warts, pigmented lesions, ganglion cysts, giant cell tumors of the tendon sheath, and vascular tumors. [2-5] Warts can be treated using cryotherapy, electrocoagulation, laser therapy, and topical drug applications, so they are rarely encountered by the hand surgeon. [6] With other benign tumors, treatment is excision with clear surgical margins. Yet, 1%-2% of primary hand tumors are malignant and these tumors require broader margins and further work-up. [7] There is a relative consensus on the most common malignant skin tumor of the upper extremity as squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). [8,9] Frequencies of the sarcomas differ from each other in different case series, as these tumors are extremely rare. Undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma (formerly known as malignan fibrous histiocytoma), liposarcoma, and fibrosarcoma are the most common soft-tissue sarcomas diagnosed in the upper extremity. [10,11] Although malignant tumors are rarely seen in the upper extremity, the rate of malignancy is higher if the patient has certain conditions. Having inherited diseases such Background: Upper extremity tumors (UETs) and their treatment may impair hand functions. Successful prediction of the histopathological examination before surgery will speed up the treatment process. The aim of this study is to determine the frequency and prediction accuracy of tumors encountered in the upper extremity. Patients and Methods: Records of patients operated for UETs between January 2010 and December 2019 were reviewed. Patient gender, initial complaint, the anatomic region of the tumor, comorbidities predisposing to malignancy, method of biopsy, preliminary diagnosis and predicted malignancy status after initial examination, definitive histopathological diagnosis, and malignancy status were extracted retrospectively. Prediction accuracy rates were calculated for each tumor group. Chi-square analysis was used for comparative analysis of prediction accuracy rates between cutaneous pigmented versus soft-tissue lesions and patients with/without a predisposition to malignancy. Results: The study included 416 pathological specimens from 290 patients. The most common tumors of the upper extremity were lipoma (20%), ganglion cyst (10.1%), and epidermoid cyst (5.8%). After pathological evaluation, 23 specimens were diagnosed as malignant (5.5%) and 32 specimens as premalignant (7.7%). The prediction of malignancy status was accurate in 390 specimens (93.7%). Soft-tissue sarcomas (67.7%) and vascular lesions (58.1%) have the lowest accuracy rates among all tumors. Conclusion: Definitive diagnosis and malignity status can be predicted after the initial examination in the majority of the cases. However, imaging studies or incisional biopsies are needed for soft-tissue sarcomas, vascular tumors, or tumors of patients with a predisposing condition to malignancy.

In January 2002, the Multiprofessional Skin Cancer Committee published guidelines on the management of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). We have undertaken a survey amongst plastic surgeons in the UK in order to establish the current standards for excision margins of SCC. There was no consensus on the excision margin to be taken for an SCC, nor was there any agreement as to whether a completely excised SCC ever warranted further excision. Furthermore, the majority of surgeons would take a wider margin for SCC on the limbs, but not for those on the head and neck. This is in contrast to the guidelines, which recommend a larger margin for the high-risk sites of the ear, lip, scalp, eyelids and nose. In addition, most pathology reports comment on completeness of excision margins but only few mention the depth of the tumour. We discuss the evidence behind the current guidelines and look at areas for improvement in the standardisation of the management of SCC.

In this paper a methodological approach to the classification of pigmented skin lesions in dermoscopy images is presented. First, automatic border detection is performed to separate the lesion from the background skin. Shape features are then extracted from this border. For the extraction of color and texture related features, the image is divided into various clinically significant regions using the Euclidean distance transform. This feature data is fed into an optimization framework, which ranks the features using various feature selection algorithms and determines the optimal feature subset size according to the area under the ROC curve measure obtained from support vector machine classification. The issue of class imbalance is addressed using various sampling strategies, and the classifier generalization error is estimated using Monte Carlo cross validation. Experiments on a set of 564 images yielded a specificity of 92.34% and a sensitivity of 93.33%.

What in the World is Melanoma? is a collection of vital information about Melanoma, a skin cancer which is caused by an abnormal growth of the cells that produce melanin. Various factors of the cancer are analyzed such as environmental and genetic causes as well as the history of cases reported. The current, ongoing research regarding Melanoma as well as the future of the cancer will be explored further in the book.