The Australian-developed Skin Polarprobe system for detecting melanoma will be in the world spotlight in London this week.

The system will be presented at the 6th International Congress of the International Society for Skin Imaging, held from 4-6 July.

The Skin Polarprobe was developed by Australian medical instrument company Polartechnics Ltd in collaboration with CSIRO and the Sydney Melanoma Unit.

CSIRO developed the sophisticated image analysis software that lies at the heart of the system.

The Skin Polarprobe has the potential to help reduce the number of deaths from advanced melanoma as well reducing the number of excisions of harmless spots.

Dr Scott Menzies of the Sydney Melanoma Unit will present the latest version of the system at the London congress.

Polartechnics is seeking an international joint venture partner to assist in the commercialisation of the device.

"We now have a new tool to detect melanoma", says Mr David Varvel Skin Polarprobe project leader.

"Melanoma incidence is rising worldwide, with numbers of new cases expected to increase by 6% in the UK this year, a nation not traditionally associated with melanoma.

With the Skin Polarprobe, dermatologists and general practitioners will have much greater confidence in diagnosing this deadly cancer."

The system is significantly better at recognising malignant melanoma than the majority of physicians.

Most general practitioners have difficulty diagnosing melanoma because they rarely encounter them, a fact which results in the excision of many harmless lesions.

In future, they will be able use the Skin Polarprobe in their surgeries to capture images of a patient's skin lesions, automatically analyse them using real-time image analysis techniques and give a reliable diagnosis.

The image analysis software, developed with CSIRO, examines diagnostic features such as the shape, colour, symmetry and regularity of the lesions and compares these with charcteristics of melanoma derived from past diagnoses.

This allows a decision to be made as to whether the lesion is a melanoma or not.

"If the software finds a match between the characteristics of the suspect lesion and known melanomas, the physician can immediately recommend appropriate treatment without time-consuming and traumatic biopsies," says CSIRO's project leader, Leanne Bischof.

CSIRO has been improving the system's reliability by increasing the range of diagnostic features measured.

Over the past eight months, five Skin Polarprobe systems have been tested in clinics around Australia and they show a significant improvement in the results achieved by an earlier version of the Skin Polarprobe shown at the 1997 World Melanoma Congress in Sydney.

Polartechnics will now place several systems in clinics in the US and Europe for further data collection.

More information from:

Mr David Varvel, Polartechnics (from 3-6 July)

c/o the Astoria Hotel London UK on + 44 0171 834 1965, mob +61 416274885

Victor Skladnev, Managing Director, Polartechnics, Sydney, Australia

Phone: +61 2 9358 3276

Leanne Bischof, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia

Phone +61 2 9325 3210, +61 2 9808 5048

http://www.polartechnics.com.au/

http://www.cmis.csiro.au/IAP/recentprojects/melanoma.htm