Los Angeles dermatologist Andrew Kaufman says that digital microscopy is an important advance given the nation's surging rate of melanoma. Since 1981, the incidence rate of melanoma has grown by 3 percent each year, according to the American Cancer Society. An estimated 51,400 people will be diagnosed with the disease this year. We've seen a dramatic increase in melanoma incidence. Melanoma is rarely life-threatening if detected early.
Survival rates drop dramatically, though, if the cancer has spread.
With digital microscopy, doctors use a hand-held microscope attached to a camera and computer to take and store pictures of a mole or skin abnormality. The technology is sometimes referred to as digital epiluminescence microscopy. Once the pictures are scanned into the computer, doctors can magnify them to get a closer look at the skin. That recommendation, however, can be impractical for people with a condition called dysplastic nevi, which means they have a lot of atypical moles, Lefkovits says. However, if you're going to try to pick up every melanoma, you're going to end up doing biopsies on a lot of benign lesions.