How to practically approach diagnosis of Melanocytic lesions

With the increasing number of pigmented cutaneous diseases, improved scientific knowledge of the biology and molecular pathogenesis of these diseases, and recent availability of new targeted treatment options, dermatopathologists need to keep up with new information including nomenclature, staging criteria, ancillary studies and classical histopathology features of each entity. Not only recognizing the key clinical and histophenotypic features, but also identifying and interpreting the essential ancillary studies are extremely important for establishing the correct diagnosis and advising the treating clinician for appropriate therapies in the current era of personalized medicine.
It would focus on the key aspects of up-to-date clinical, histophenotypic features together with common ancillary studies to differentiate benign from malignant melanocytic lesions in skin (nevus vs. melanoma), and lymph node (capsular nevus vs. metastatic melanoma) in patients with melanoma, based on our extensive experience in a large tertiary referral No.1 cancer center in USA.