Hi Dermatologist here These features (ABCD) are very helpful for patients and other doctors in highlighting moles that should be checked. However, dermatologis

Hi Dermatologist here These features (ABCD) are very helpful for patients and other doctors in highlighting moles that should be checked. However, dermatologists generally use a dermatoscope (magnified image) to examine the pattern of pigment within the mole as an important part of deciding whether it is benign or malignant. There is a long list of dermoscopic criteria that can help to identify melanoma and this is used by doctors training in dermatology but in practice I think that it is seeing lots of normal moles that is the most useful. The brain becomes trained to recognise a normal mole and when it sees something that does not match this pattern it is labeled as suspicious - often I cannot say exactly why. Recognizing a clear cut melanoma is very straightforward, even for a medical student the difficulty is in distinguishing moles that look abnormal but are actually harmless. At the present time these would be excised and examined under the microscope and as a consequence a large fraction (up to 90%) of moles removed are harmless moles. I suspect that this device will not increase the number of melanomas diagnosed, but if it is sufficiently sensitive and specific it might reduce the number of normal moles removed.