Melanoma is one of the most aggressive types of skin cancer. When detected at an early-stage treatment is usually successful, however, outcomes are often poor when the disease is detected at an advanced stage. There has been considerable progress in our understanding of the molecular biology, genetics, and immunology of melanoma over the past decade. This has been accompanied by rapid advances in therapeutic strategies for patients with melanoma and an overall improvement in survival rates. However, in spite of these successes, new techniques, and strategies to facilitate early detection, and thus improvements of patient’s outcome is needed as mortality remains high. The work in this thesis aims to utilize a novel noninvasive spatial frequency domain spectroscopy (SFDS) based imaging approach to facilitate early detection on melanoma.