Question

A physician takes a biopsy, or tissue sample, from the skin of a patient. Which observation of the cells in the tissue would most strongly support the conclusion that the patient has skin cancer?

Answer 1

Biopsy is the technique that is used to analyze whether the skin lesions are cancerous or not and if it is skin cancer what kind of skin cancer is it.

Skin cancer can be either it can be basal cell cancer, squamous cell skin cancer or melanoma. The changes that can be observed during the biopsy of skin cells are:

The types of cell, arrangement of cells, abnormal growth of the cell, cell shape, et cetera.

The cancerous cells might destroy the basement membrane or else compact mass of cells can also be observed.

Answer 2

There are different skin cancer types such as basal-cell skin cancer, squamous-cell skin cancer and melanoma. They all differ in appearance but some of the changes in the tissue are similar. Observed changes can be found in:

• The types of cells

• That how the cells are arranged

• Whether the cells are abnormal (tumor cells can be pleomorphic or atypical)

For example, tumor cells might destroy the basement membrane and form compact masses which invade the dermis. Also, tumor cells tend to transform into keratinized squamous cells and form round nodules with concentric layers-cell nests.