Cryosurgery for Malignant Melanoma

Abstract

Malignant melanoma is not seldom and its prognosis is notoriously bad. Treatment of the disease has proved difficult for many years, and even the results of treatment with new therapeutic agents have been disappointing. The fast neutron therapy has been recently introduced, but its indication is limited. Problems include: (1) initially, misdiagnosis of the lesion and careless biopsy lead to rapid general metastases, and (2) though controversies about diagnosis (6, 7) and regional lymph node dissection (2,4) still exist, a wide excision and frequent sacrificing of the patient’s limb are generally accepted as surgical treatment. For this reason, when the lesion is suspected of malignancy, cryobiopsy, immobilizing tumor cells by cryosolidification of the lesion and resection should be the first choice. That is, the suspicious lesion is frozen by the contact method until the ice boundary encompasses at least 10 mm beyond the tumor margin, then the lesion is excised while it is in the frozen state, followed by immediate histological examination.