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Dr Daniel Glass
The Dermatology Clinic London
How is skin cancer diagnosed?
Dr. Daniel Glass explains that skin cancer is diagnosed by taking a patient history, assessing the lesion/mole, and examining carefully with a dermatoscope.
Transcript
In many cases, you can look with the naked eye and when examining the skin, you can pick out what you think is a skin cancer. There's a tool that we use called a dermaoscope, which magnifies the skin by tenfold, and that helps increase accuracy of diagnosing skin cancer. And sometimes you're not sure, and then you undertake a biopsy. A biopsy involves taking a small sample from the skin and sending it to the lab to be analysed. In many cases, the skin cancers are quite small and you may just take the whole skin cancer out rather than biopsying it, but each case is judged on its merits.