American Joint Committee on Cancer (1983)

 
Five years after the UICC system was proclaimed, the AJCC proposed a revision of its own system for staging melanoma.12 A major change was moving patients with in-transit metastases to a higher stage (III/IV), thereby endowing that phenomenon with a worse prognosis than had been attributed to it before. In prior systems, in-transit metastases were assigned to Stage I or II, the implication of that being rather favorable prognosis. The revised system of the AJCC was constructed in this way:
 
Stage IA. Localized melanoma <0.75 mm thick or < level II
Stage IB. Localized melanoma >0.75 to 1.50 mm thick or level III
Stage IIA. Localized melanoma >1.50 to 4.00 mm thick or level IV
Stage IIB. Localized melanoma >4.00 mm thick or level V
Stage III. Lymph node metastases to one regional basin or < 5 mm in-transit metastases without nodal disease
Stage IV. Advanced regional disease (defined as more than one regional lymph node basin, regional lymph nodes > 5 mm or fixed, > 5 mm in-transit metastases at least 2 cm from the primary lesion) or any distant metastasis