Ultrastructural and clinical features of central nervous system melanoma:Analysis of nine cases

ABSTRACT

To investigate the ultrastructural and clinical characteristics of melanoma of the central nervous system (CNS). The clinical and electron microscopy pathology data of nine patients with melanoma surveyed from 1993 to 2017 were analyzed. All the CNS melanomas were confirmed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), including eight cases of primary melanomas and one case of metastatic melanoma. In this study, four stage II melanosomes were intracranial space-occupying, three of which were malignant melanoma, the other one was melanoma. Among the five stage IV melanosomes, four cases were intraspinal space-occupying, the other one was intracranial space-occupying, and the pathological diagnoses were all melanoma. At present, TEM is an important tool for the diagnosis of CNS melanomas. Malignant melanoma has high malignancy and recurrence rate and poor prognosis, while benign melanoma with relatively low recurrence rate, so we speculate that patients with mainly immature melanosomes are more likely to exhibit recurrence.

KEYWORDS:

• Melanoma
• central nervous system neoplasms
• ultrastructure
• clinical analysis

Acknowledgments

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

TEM, transmission electron microscope; MRI, magnetic resonance imaging; H&E, hematoxylin and eosin.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Authors’ contributions

QZ contributed to the design of the research and drafting the manuscript and analyzed and interpreted the data. HBZ made substantial contributions to conception and acquisition of data. YW and CPZ performed the experiments. YJH and GLL revised and finalized the article and gave final approval for the version to be published. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

This study was ethically approved by the Ethics Committee of the Tiantan Hospital (Beijing, China). Informed consent was obtained from the study participants.

Consent for publication

All patients provided consent for the publication of their data.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.