CASE REPORT article
Front. Med.
Sec. Dermatology
Case Report: Imaging findings in sneaky subungual amelanotic melanoma
Provisionally accepted
- 1Zhejiang Hospital, Hangzhou, China
- 2The Second School of Clinical Medicine, Zhejiang University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Hangzhou, China
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We report a rare case of solitary subungual malignant melanoma in a female patient, who presented with a misaligned nail without accompanying pigmentary changes. The absence of typical clinical and imaging features delayed definitive diagnosis. Both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound (US) initially suggested a benign lesion, favoring subungual telangiectatic granuloma. However, histopathology ultimately confirmed subungual melanoma with negative Human Melanoma Black-45 (HMB-45) immunostaining. Amelanotic melanomas are particularly prone to misdiagnosis or delayed recognition due to their lack of visible pigmentation. We present a detailed analysis of the imaging and pathological findings, highlighting specific ultrasound characteristics, with the aim of providing a valuable reference for the clinical diagnosis and management of such uncommon cases.
Keywords: subungual ultrasound, Amelanotic melanoma, subungual telangiectatic granuloma, Skintumor, Case repot
Received: 16 Aug 2025; Accepted: 04 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shi, Zhao, Zhu, Sun, Dai, Bin and Dong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Huang Bin, hb2k@163.com
Zeyang Dong, dzyang_zcmu@163.com
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