Adhesive Patch Test

Adhesive Patch Test

Melanoma diagnoses are solely dependent on visual assessment of pigmented lesions, which leaves a margin of error when deciding lesions to biopsy; in turn, this leads to many invasive biopsies yielding negative results (Ferris et al., 2017). This wastes valuable resources: money, dermatologists' time, pathologists' fees (Gerami et al., 2017). The purpose of my research was to test the effects of a non–invasive adhesive patch test in improving melanoma diagnoses. My research question was: How does the use of DermTech non–invasive adhesive patch test impact overall melanoma diagnosis in a dermatology clinic? My alternative hypothesis was that the DermTech noninvasive adhesive patch test would improve diagnosis. My null hypothesis was ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...Therefore, measuring quantitative statistics of negative invasive biopsies was an appropriate method. I also assumed that there are no other changing factors in the clinic that impact melanoma diagnosis. This lowered the external validity of my research and made it harder to generalize it to other clinics, in other parts of the world. Although, the DermTech adhesive patch test claims to work for all abnormal/atypical skin lesions (Gerami et al., 2017), I only studied melanoma due to the limited number of patients at my clinic.

For my research sub–question, I compared the results of patients that had lesions biopsied and had the DermTech test performed on the same lesion. I assumed that the invasive biopsy always yielded correct results because the noninvasive DermTech was compared against it. I also had to assume that the any results coming from the DermTech lab that claim to be indecisive were negative since they have no utility in the diagnosing procedure.

My external validity was low since I only had access to one pathology lab and one dermatology clinic. Furthermore, the clinic only had one dermatologist whose diagnoses I measured. The dermatologist did not account for all age groups, levels of experience etc.

My research had high internal validity since the same dermatologist and nurses remained constant throughout the course of the data that I collected. There have also been no other changes in

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