Introduction: Early diagnosis and treatment of metastases have been shown to improve overall survival of melanoma patients. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of extensive initial staging, including positron emission tomography (PET) scan on the management of melanoma patients. Patients and methods: Forty-three patients with intermediate/poor prognosis primary melanoma benefited from complementary excision and sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLB) after clinical and paraclinical. staging (computed tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance and whole body fluorodeoxyglucose PET scan). Results: No systemic metastases were demonstrated, while the SLB procedure emphasized the presence of regional lymph node metastases in 10 patients as suggested by the PET scan in four patients (sensitivity of the PET scan 40% ). These 10 patients with early diagnosed lymph node involvement benefited from early surgery and were included in adju vant treatment protocols. A secondary primary cancer was fortuitously diagnosed and treated early in two patients. Conclusions: The development of new adjuvant therapies and therapeutic procedures (specific and non-specific immunotherapy, gamma-knife radiosurgery, etc.) now raises the relevance of extensive staging in intermediate/poor prognosis melanoma patients. We confirm in our series that PET scan is not useful to detect micrometastasis and cannot replace SLB in initial regional staging. However, we show in our study that 12 of 43 patients were treated early or were included early in treatment protocols thanks to the extensive staging procedure. Nevertheless, it seems important to evaluate through larger prospective trials the real impact of these early diagnoses and new treatments on overall survival before defining new diagnostic and therapeutic guidelines. Introduction: Early diagnosis and treatment of metastases have been shown to improve the overall survival of melanoma patients. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of extensive initial staging, including positron emission tomography (PET) scan on the management of melanoma patients. Patients and methods: Forty-three patients with intermediate / poor prognosis primary melanoma benefited from complementary excision and sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLB) after clinical and paraclcical staging (computed tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance and whole body fluorodeoxyglucose PET scan). Results: No systemic metastases were demonstrated while while the SLB procedure emphasized the presence of regional lymph node metastases in 10 patients as suggested by the PET scan in four patients (sensitivity of the PET scan 40%). These 10 patients with early diagnosed lymph node involvement benefited from early surgery and were included in adju vant treatment protocols. A secondary primary cancer was fortuitously diagnosed and treated early in two patients. Conclusions: The development of new adjuvant therapies and therapeutic procedures (specific and non-specific immunotherapy, gamma-knife radiosurgery, etc.) now raises the relevance of extensive staging in intermediate / poor prognosis melanoma patients. We confirm in our series that PET scan is not useful to detect micrometastasis and can not replace SLB in initial regional staging. However, we show in our study that 12 of 43 patients were treated early or were included early in treatment protocols thanks to the Nevertheless, it seems important to evaluate through larger prospective trials the real impact of these early diagnoses and new treatments on overall survival before defining new diagnostic and therapeutic guidelines.