More than three million Americans are treated for non-melanoma skin cancers every year, and the number continues to grow. Doctors are continually developing new tools to catch the cancers sooner but only one hospital in the country uses a groundbreaking new device. NY1's Erin Billups filed the following report.

Growing up, Janet Beegan spent many hours on Long Island beaches.

"I always laid in the sun and used to put no sun screen, I used to put baby oil on," she recalls.

Basal cell carcinomas are the most common type of skin cancer, highly treatable, and least likely to spread.

Beegan saw her first in her late 20s.

"How they treated it was biopsy and you have to wait, make another appointment, go back, and then they would scrape and burn, and take another biopsy and then if you have anymore you have another scrape and burn," says Beegan.

A lot has changed since then. For the past five years Mount Sinai Dermatologist Orit Markowitz has been treating Beegan, using the OCT device, short for Optical Coherence Tomography. It uses lasers to look beneath the skin without having to do a biopsy.

"When we cut the skin out we only look at one tiny section. With this device it’s like we have 160 sections so it’s like a flipbook animation of sections. So we’re able also to see things that we wouldn’t even be able to see in pathology," explains Dr. Markowitz.

With OCT Markowitz is able to tell whether an annomoly on the skin is the beginning of a basal or squamous cell carcinoma, before the tumor really starts to form.

In a study conducted by her team, 48 percent more basal cell carcinomas were detected through OCT than by regular clinical examination.

"In addition to preventing unnecessary cutting in you know cosmetically challenging areas, it’s also to be able now to diagnose things substantially earlier in cosmetically challenging areas," says Dr. Markowitz.

Eliminating the need for surgery in some cases like with the basal cell on Beegan's leg she was able to just apply cream. Now it's all gone.

"It's kind of nice, I don’t have to...it's all done in one visit, I don’t have to come back to schedule another visit until you know few months later to follow up for it," says Beegan.

It's a standard part of care for Markowitz' patients, but certainly not standard in the U.S. At this point the FDA-approved OCT device is only used clinically at Mount Sinai, though it is popular in Europe.