New melanoma staging guidelines to improve consistency, accuracy of diagnoses

Source: UPI Top News, June 2018

Researchers with the American Joint Committee on Cancer have updated the guidelines for determining the severity of individual cases of a type of serious skin cancer known as invasive melanoma.
Judging the severity of a tumor growth, called “cancer staging," isn’t easy. Research shows pathologists, after looking at the same imaging of the exact same tumor, regularly disagree on the cancer’s staging.
During a previous study of invasive melanoma staging based on the old guidelines, researchers found pathologists disagreed more than 50 percent of the time. With their update, researchers hoped the guidelines would produce greater consensus among pathologists.