Pathologic melanoma staging grouped by prognosis and true positive rate of detecting metastatic disease

In patients with cutaneous melanoma, as pathologic stage advances, systemic imaging is more likely to detect a true positive finding for metastatic disease rather than a false positive finding. For example, the presence of pulmonary nodules on chest radiography or CT in a patient with pathologic stage I disease most likely represents a false positive finding. However, the same nodules in a patient with pathologic stage IIID disease are more likely to represent a true positive finding, and further evaluation will be needed to exclude metastatic disease.