Novel, Noninvasive Skin Cancer Detection Method Shows Promise

A new dual-modal, non-invasive detection technique could make it easier—and faster—to differentiate between melanoma skin cancer and benign lesions.

The combination of optical coherence tomography (OCT) and Raman spectroscopy achieved 96.9% accuracy in differentiating melanoma and benign lesions when paired with a machine learning algorithm in a new study.¹ The method also had an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.99. The findings were reported in the Journal of Biophotonics.

Early diagnosis of melanoma can have profound impacts on patient survival, the authors noted. Patients whose cases are caught at an early stage have a 99% 5-year survival rate, but if the cancer metastasizes to distant organs, the survival rate drops to just 35%.²