Skin tumors have been treated by wide and deep excisions for many decades, however in recent years surgical margins have been substantially reduced without reducing survival and avoiding such disfiguring surgeries.

The need to obtain increasingly tighter tumor-free margins requires an exact surgical incision and an anatomical-pathological correlation to confirm this.

Discrepancies between surgical (in vivo) and pathological measurements of surgical specimens are frequent in daily clinical practice due to skin contraction.