Health Hub · Skin cancer
If you have had a skin check, you will have seen your doctor lean in with a small handheld instrument pressed gently against your skin. That instrument is a dermatoscope, and the technique, dermoscopy, is central to how modern skin cancer medicine is practised in general practice.
Key points
- ✓A dermatoscope magnifies and illuminates the skin with polarised light
- ✓It reveals colours and structures beneath the surface that the naked eye cannot see
- ✓It helps your GP decide whether a spot can be left, monitored or biopsied
- ✓Suspicious spots can be photographed and compared over time
- ✓Dermoscopy is non-invasive and does not break the skin
What a dermatoscope actually does
A dermatoscope combines strong magnification with a polarised light source. Ordinary light bounces off the surface of the skin; polarised light passes through the outer layer, so the doctor can see pigment patterns, blood vessels and structures in the deeper layers of a spot. Those patterns matter, because harmless moles, sunspots, basal cell carcinomas and melanomas each tend to produce different structures under dermoscopy. Read more about the three main types of skin cancer and how they differ.
Why it matters at your skin check
The practical value of dermoscopy is decision-making. Examining a spot in this detail helps your GP sort spots into three groups: clearly harmless, worth monitoring, or needing a biopsy to get a definitive answer from pathology. That means fewer unnecessary procedures on harmless spots, and closer attention on the ones that warrant it. Every full body skin check at our Hervey Bay skin cancer clinic is performed with a dermatoscope, head to toe.
Digital dermoscopy monitoring
Some spots are not worrying enough to biopsy but not boring enough to ignore. For these, your GP can photograph the spot through the dermatoscope and store the image, so the same spot can be compared side by side at a future visit. This is digital dermoscopy monitoring of suspicious lesions: a record of individual spots over time, made so genuine change can be picked up rather than guessed at.
Dermoscopy and mole mapping are different things
Dermoscopy looks at individual spots in high detail. Mole mapping with OptimaScan photographs your entire skin surface, creating a whole-of-body baseline your GP compares over time. See what happens at an OptimaScan appointment. They complement each other: mole mapping flags what has changed across your skin, dermoscopy examines those spots properly. Our guide to skin checks vs mole mapping explains which suits which situation, and how often to have a skin check covers timing.
Frequently asked questions
Does dermoscopy hurt?
Can dermoscopy diagnose skin cancer?
Is a dermoscopy examination bulk billed?
Have your skin examined properly
Our GPs, including doctors with advanced training and a special interest in skin cancer medicine, use dermoscopy at every skin check. If you are weighing up a dermatologist against a GP skin cancer clinic, that guide explains the difference. 71 Main Street, Pialba.
This article is general information and is not a substitute for individual medical advice.
Last reviewed September 2026