The dermatoscope consists of a magnifier, a light source (polarized or non-polarized), a transparent plate and sometimes a liquid medium between the instrument and the skin.

A hand held dermatoscope is composed of a transilluminating light source and a magnifying optic (usually a 10-fold magnification).

[3] Thus, there is considerable improvement in the sensitivity (detection of melanomas) as well as specificity (percentage of non-melanomas correctly diagnosed as benign), compared with naked eye examination.

[26][27] Patients will consent their lesion pictures to be stored in a database which acts as an archive and allow artificial intelligence programs to compare newly taken ones.

[28] Skin surface microscopy started in 1663 by Johan Christophorous Kolhaus and was improved with the addition of immersion oil in 1878 by Ernst Abbe.

Leon Goldman was the first dermatologist to coin the term "dermascopy" and to use the dermatoscope to evaluate pigmented cutaneous lesions.

A team of physicians led by Professor Otto Braun-Falco in collaboration with the medical device manufacturer HEINE Optotechnik developed a dermatoscope, which was hand-held and illuminated by a halogen lamp.

The approach was confirmed by Wilhelm Stolz et al. from the Department of Dermatology and Allergology of the University of Munich and published in the "Lancet"(1989).

While in the past decades computer vision algorithms and hardware-based method were used[32][33] large standardized public image collections such as HAM10000[34] enabled application of convolutional neural networks.