Principles of high‐frequency ultrasonography for investigation of skin pathology

Abstract

Ultrasonography is a valuable diagnostic tool widely used in medicine. During the last three decades, this non-invasive skin imaging method has been extended to dermatology. High-frequency ultrasonography with higher than 20MHz scanners is well-established for measuring tumour thickness and skin thickness when treating inflammatory skin diseases such as scleroderma or psoriasis. High-frequency ultrasonography has become extremely helpful for the preoperative assessment of skin melanoma. The correlation between ultrasonic and histological measurements of melanomas thickness is significantly similarly good using transducers of 20, 75 or 100MHz frequency (r range from 0.895 to 0.99) and better compared with transducers of 7.5MHz frequency (r=0.76). The preoperative sonographically estimated thickness of skin melanoma is sometimes overestimated, because of an underlying inflammatory infiltrate and other reasons. Assessment of skin melanoma thickness using transducers of 100MHz frequency has better agreement with histology, compared with ultrasonography with 20MHz transducers. However, the ultrasonic penetration depth is limited to 1.5mm in case of 100MHz. The newer ultrasonic techniques such as high-frequency ultrasonography and colour Doppler sonography could be used for assessment of the tumour vascularization and its metastatic potential. The wide variety of diagnostic information provided by high-frequency ultrasonography undoubtedly improves the management of oncological and inflammatory skin conditions and underlines its essential position in dermatological practice.

Differentiation of Benign and Malignant Skin Lesions with Color and Power Doppler Ultrasonography

“…Owing to its increased sensitivity to flow, power Doppler sonography is valuable in low-flow states and when optimal Doppler angles can not be obtained. Longer segments of vessels and more individual vessels can be visualized with power Doppler US than with conventional color Doppler sonography [1,2,9]. According to the vascular pattern detected on PDUS, the lesions were classified as having peripheral, central, or mixed-type vascularity, similar to a categorization reported for breast tumors [10].…”

“…Sometimes, differentiation between benign and malign skin lesions may be difficult [1][2][3][4]. At present, there are two basic types of transducers used for dermatologic ultrasonography, one for diagnosis of regional lymph nodes and soft tissue tumors with intermediate frequency range from 7.5 to 15 MHz and another with high-frequency transducer (20 to 50 MHz) for evaluating cutaneous structure function [1][2][3][4]11,12].…”

“…During the last three decades, this noninvasive skin imaging method has been extended to dermatology [1]. Diagnostic process in dermatology usually depends on clinical assessment, dermoscopic and histopathologic examination [2].…”

New Approaches to the Diagnosis of Atopic Dermatitis in Children

“…Ультразвуковые волны яв-ляются механическими колебаниями, и поэтому изображения, полученные с помощью ультразвука, отличаются от оптических [11,13,19,20].…”

Application of automatic statistical post-processing method for analysis of ultrasonic and digital dermatoscopy images

“…The analysis of deeper skin layer can also be informative in order to recognize malignant skin tumour at the early stage. Unfortunately, most of the studies have been related with the thickness measurements of melanocytic skin tumours [22,23]. There are only few studies, related with the melanocytic skin tumour diagnosis based on the analysis of the acquired ultrasonic data.…”