Diagnostic Accuracy of Line-Field Confocal Optical Coherence Tomography for the Diagnosis of Skin Carcinomas

January 21, 2023 | Dermatology | Université Libre de Bruxelles, University of Barcelona, University of Siena

Alessandra Cartocci, Elisa Cinotti, Javiera Perez-Anker, Jean-Luc Perrot, Josep Malvehy, Linda Tognetti, Mariano Suppa, Pietro Rubegni, Susanna Puig, Tullio Brunetti

Line-field confocal optical coherence tomography (LC-OCT) is a new, noninvasive imaging technique for the diagnosis of skin cancers. A total of 243 benign (54%) and malignant (46%) skin lesions were consecutively enrolled from 27 August 2020, to 6 October 2021 at the Dermatology Department of the University Hospital of Siena, Italy. Dermoscopic- and LC-OCT-based diagnoses were given by an expert dermatologist and compared with the ground truth. Considering all types of malignant skin tumours (79 basal cell carcinomas (BCCs), 22 squamous cell carcinomas, and 10 melanomas), a statistically significant increase (p = 0.013) in specificity was observed from dermoscopy (0.73, CI 0.64–0.81) to LC-OCT (0.87, CI 0.79–0.93) while sensitivity was the same with the two imaging techniques (0.95 CI 0.89–0.98 for dermoscopy and 0.95 CI 0.90–0.99 for LC-OCT). The increase in specificity was mainly driven by the ability of LC-OCT to differentiate BCCs from other diagnoses. In conclusion, our real-li...