Reflectance confocal microscopy for inflammatory skin diseases.

ABSTRACT

Reflectance confocal microscopy evaluation of inflammatory skin diseases represents a relatively new indication that, during the last 5 years, has shown an increasing interest with consequent progressive increment of publications in literature. The success of RCM in this filed of dermatology is directly related to the high needing of non-invasive techniques able to reduce the number of skin biopsies and support the clinical diagnosis and patient's management. RCM demonstrated to visualize microscopic descriptors of inflammatory and pigmentary skin conditions with good reproducibility between observer and high grade of correspondence with optical histology. Moreover, RCM has shown to provide sufficient data to support clinical diagnosis and differential diagnosis of inflammatory and pigmentary skin diseases. Recently, several works published in literature have opened the prospective to use RCM also for therapeutic follow-up in order to monitor the improvement of the microscopic parameters and help to prevent treatment side effects. In this review article we present some examples of RCM application in inflammatory and pigmentary diseases.