Skin Cancer Detection Technology

Abstract

Skin cancer is the most common malignancy in the United States. Health care providers and patients alike are tasked with identifying suspicious skin lesions in order to diagnose skin cancers early and treat them quickly. The normal pathway to skin cancer diagnosis is visual, with dermoscopic assessment of the lesion followed by biopsy and histopathologic evaluation. Recently, many innovative skin cancer detection technologies have been developed to increase diagnostic accuracy for skin cancers. These noninvasive technologies offer benefits over biopsy but are limited by expense, training, and poor specificity. The skin cancer detection techniques are reviewed in this article.

Keywords: Melanoma; Multispectral digital skin lesion analysis; Nonmelanoma skin cancer; Optical coherence tomography; Pigmented lesion assay; Reflectance confocal microscopy; Skin cancer.