Melanoma Staging

Staging allows clinicians to describe the severity of an individual’s cancer and is an important part of cancer diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognostication. Due to the heterogeneity among different cancer types, each cancer has unique staging criteria that include clinical characteristics important for that specific cancer type. For melanoma, those specific characteristics include Breslow depth, presence of ulceration, and mitotic rate, in addition to the nodal and metastatic criteria commonly present in other cancer types.