Bridging the gap: Cytopathology at the threshold of personalized medicine

摘要

The discipline of Anatomic Pathology has experienced a number of technical innovations significantly changing how physicians practice the art and science of pathology and view their professional responsibilities. Initially, pathology was the study of gross morbid anatomy. The application of light microscopy to the study of disease produced the discipline of histopathology and gave birth to modern Surgical Pathology as practiced by Arthur Purdy Stout and Lauren V. Akerman among others. Cyto-pathology as championed by Papanicolaou had its major impact on patient screening for early detection of neo-plastic disease and monitoring for disease recurrence. The development of electron microscopy and immunohisto-chemistry significantly improved the pathologist's ability to determine a neoplasm's direction of differentiation and more accurately predict a given neoplasm's biopotential and the patient's response to therapy.