Electro-Optical's MelaFind diagnoses skin cancer as accurately as physicians, study says

By Angela McDaniels

Seattle, March 6 - Electro-Optical Sciences Inc.'s MelaFind diagnostic product detected melanoma as accurately as physicians during a blinded, multicenter study, according to a company news release.

Researchers compared the diagnostic performance of the MelaFind system to visual examinations by dermatologists, the current standard of care for melanoma detection. The study included 562 skin lesions, 54 of which were melanomas.

Study dermatologists detected 53 melanomas, the same number as MelaFind. The dermatologists missed an invasive melanoma, and MelaFind missed a melanoma in situ.

The specificity achieved by MelaFind was 45.1%, and the specificity achieved by study dermatologists was 20.0%. The over-biopsy ratio for study dermatologists was 7.3 to 1, compared with 5 to 1 for MelaFind, according to the release.

In an additional technical study, clinical ABCD determination by experts who pioneered the ABCD criteria was compared with quantitative ABCD assessment by MelaFind. The company said study authors concluded that there is appreciable but not complete overlap between the sets of lesions identified as being at risk for melanoma by clinical ABCD by expert dermatologists compared with quantitative ABCD using MelaFind.

Finally, in a readers study comparing the ability of MelaFind and nine dermatologists to diagnose small lesions (2 mm to 6 mm in maximum dimension), MelaFind's sensitivity was 98.0%, compared with 70.1% for the experts.

"Dermatologists are increasingly looking to catch melanoma early, and as such, are biopsying lesions smaller than 6 mm. This study demonstrates how difficult it is to identify small, early melanomas and suggests that MelaFind may aid dermatologists in this effort," study author Robert J. Friedman of New York University Medical School said in the release.

Findings from all three studies were presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Dermoscopy Society held in conjunction with the American Academy of Dermatology 2006 Annual Meeting in San Francisco on Sunday.

Electro-Optical Sciences is a medical device company based in Irvington, N.Y., that designed and is developing MelaFind, a non-invasive, point-of-care instrument that emits multiple wavelengths of light to capture images of suspicious pigmented skin lesions and extract data, which is then analyzed against the company's proprietary database of melanomas and benign lesions.

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