Cryosurgery during Imiquimod (Immunocryosurgery) for Periocular Basal Cell Carcinomas: An Efficacious Minimally Invasive Treatment Alternative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND/AIM: Periocular basal cell carcinomas (pBCC) remain a treatment challenge. Our aim was to retrospectively evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of immunocryosurgery for the treatment of pBCC. METHODS: Immunocryosurgery is given in 5-week cycles of daily imiquimod, with cryosurgery on day 14. Patients treated between 1/1/2008 and 31/12/2014 were included in this study. RESULTS: Immunocryosurgery was offered to 19 patients. Of these, 16 (i.e., 6 males and 10 females, average age 74.9 years, median tumor diameter 15 mm, range 5-60 mm), with 1 tumor each, were treated. Six tumors (37.5%) were relapses after surgery and 2 were of metatypical histology. All BCC were high risk for recurrence after treatment; 10 tumors had 2 risk factors for relapse, 5 had 3, and 1 had 4. The follow-up period ranged between 3 and 60 months (average 25.6 months). Of the 16 tumors treated, 14 (all with a diameter <40 mm) cleared with immunocryosurgery (total efficacy 87.5%); 7 out of 16 tumors (44%; all with a diameter ≤20 mm) cleared with 1 conventional 5-week immunocryosurgery treatment cycle. Seven additional tumors (including 2 with a diameter >20 mm) required intensified treatment schemes (of up to 10 weeks) for clearance. The 2 tumors that did not clear responded partially and were also the 2 largest ones (diameter 40 and 60 mm). Of the 14 cleared tumors, 2 relapsed during follow-up; 1 cleared with immunocryosurgery. At the last examination during follow-up, 13 out of 16 (81%) patients were in sustained clinical remission. CONCLUSIONS: For most pBCC, immunocryosurgery is a feasible and efficacious alternative to surgical excision.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".