Linkedin Youtube
Launch Digital Edition

Webinars and Sponsored Roundtables — Register Now

Tuesday, October 20, 2026, 11 AM-12 PM ET
Hear experts review the biological and clinical significance of the HER2 expression continuum in breast tissue, providing a clearer understanding of how these variations might impact diagnosis, and discuss the emerging importance of documenting HER2-low and HER2-ultralow categories using a validated IHC assay.

Webinar presenters Keith Wharton, MD, PhD, Global Medical Affairs Leader–Pathology, Roche Diagnostics Solutions, and Hannah Y. Wen, MD, PhD, Director, Breast Pathology Fellowship, Associate Team Leader, Breast Pathology Team, Attending Pathologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Roche.

Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY

Register Now

Thursday, October 29, 2026, 1 PM-2 PM ET
Hear an expert discuss the evolving role of PD-L1 testing in HNSCC and ovarian cancer.

Webinar presenter Georgios Deftereos, MD, Professor of Pathology, Associate Director of the Clinical Cancer Genomics Laboratory, Director of Molecular Cytopathology, University of California, San Francisco

CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Agilent.

Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY

Register Now

Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 1 PM-2 PM ET
Hear an expert discuss the challenges of detecting NRG1 fusions and how RNA-based testing can support more comprehensive fusion identification in clinical practice.

Webinar presenter Benjamin Weinberg, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Attending Physician
specializing in gastrointestinal medical oncology

CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Diaceutics.

Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY

Register Now

Monday, November 16, 2026, 12:30 PM-2 PM ET
Hear experts discuss a multidisciplinary approach to oncopathology for HER2
assessments for solid tumors in the absence of a companion diagnostic.

Webinar presenters Funda Meric-Bernstam, MD, Chair, Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics Medical Director, Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, and Emina E. Torlakovic, MD, PhD, College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Canadian Biomarker Quality Assurance, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and Carol Cheung, MD, PhD, JD, FRCPC, Deputy Director, Canadian Biomarker Quality, Assurance—Programme canadien d’assurance de la qualité des biomarqueurs

CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. This program is being sponsored by Daiichi Sankyo, Inc. and AstraZeneca. The speaker is being compensated for the presentation. The program is not CME accredited and may not be used for CME accreditation.

Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY

Register Now

Subspecialties

Interactive Product Guides

Columns

Pathology informatics selected abstracts

October 2025—Large language models are becoming commonplace for personal and business use. The health care community is leveraging large language models (LLMs) for various purposes. Researchers at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany, have successfully used open-source LLMs to extract critical medical data from pathology reports. They conducted a study that demonstrated how LLMs can transform unstructured clinical text into structured pathology data. While pathology reports are rich in information about tumor type, size, and stage, their narrative format makes automated data extraction difficult.

Q&A column

October 2025
Q. Is telepathology used much in the United States for histology interpretation and diagnosis? For example, is it used to interpret digitally transmitted histology slides when working from home? Read answer.

Q. When a patient has a hematocrit level of ≥ 55 percent and a normal PT and APTT, do you still correct sodium citrate and ask for a redraw? Is it crucial to ask for a redraw when the emergency department orders a stat PT and APTT? Read answer.

Newsbytes

October 2025—For pathology residents, there are easier tasks than writing a perfect preliminary case report on the first attempt. Nailing Jell-O to a tree, for example, or stapling sunlight to a cloud. “When the attendings make no changes or just sign out the case as we wrote it, there’s a sense of accomplishment,” says Jingjing Cao, MD, pathology resident in the Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of California San Francisco.

Put It on the Board

October 2025—Send-out and other high-cost tests are the typical targets of lab stewardship, but a clinical decision support session at the ADLM meeting in July had a different focus: daily labs. It’s generally believed there is little to no opportunity for savings on daily labs because the reagent cost per test is low, as is the incremental labor savings for tests performed on automated instruments. Instead, said Grace Mahowald, MD, PhD, informatician and director of the core laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, “think about what goes into the cost of each of our daily lab tests,” from the nurse, patient care assistant, and phlebotomist to the specimen transporter and the lab receiving staff and technical staff who review results and call providers when specimens have to be refused at receipt. “And it’s questionable if people are even looking at the result,” she said.

From the President’s Desk

September 2025—It’s hard to believe that my two-year term as president of the CAP is already at its end. By the time you read this column, Jim Zhai, MD, will have been sworn in as our new president at the CAP annual meeting in Orlando. Serving as CAP president has given me amazing opportunities that I’m sure I would never have experienced otherwise. Perhaps the most rewarding has been the chance to meet hundreds of pathologists in the U.S. and across the globe and to witness firsthand the great work they’re doing for our profession, for the CAP, and particularly for our patients. The worldwide community of pathologists is truly impressive.

Clinical pathology selected abstracts

September 2025—Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection can lead to post-acute sequelae, or a condition known as long COVID. The World Health Organization defines long COVID as any symptoms that typically present within three months of acquiring COVID-19 and that persist for at least two months. Long COVID generally manifests as fatigue, pulmonary symptoms, and cognitive dysfunction. The biological mechanisms of long COVID are not well understood. Changes in the serotonin system may lead to cognitive changes, while mitochondrial changes may lead to fatigue, and complement and platelet activation to vascular disease.

Anatomic pathology selected abstracts

September 2025—The efficacy of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 antibody-drug conjugate therapy for treating HER2-low breast cancers necessitates more accurate and reproducible HER2 IHC scoring. The authors conducted a study to validate the performance and utility of a fully automated artificial intelligence (AI) solution for interpreting HER2 IHC in breast carcinoma. In the two-arm multireader study of 120 HER2 IHC whole slide images from four sites, four surgical pathologists assessed HER2 scoring with and without the aid of an AI solution. Both arms of the study were compared with high-confidence ground truth established by agreement of at least four of five breast pathology subspecialists according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology/College of American Pathologists (ASCO/CAP) 2018 and 2023 guidelines. The mean interobserver agreement among the ground truth pathologists across all HER2 scores was 72.4 percent (n =120).

Molecular pathology selected abstracts

September 2025—When someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly, a forensic autopsy is often performed to identify the manner and cause of death. However, up to 30 percent of autopsies fail to identify any underlying anatomic or toxicologic etiologies, and the autopsy classification may be sudden unexplained death. This is particularly concerning in young people, in whom the cause could be an inherited genetic condition that could also affect family members. Therefore, postmortem genetic testing, also known as a molecular autopsy, may have utility in identifying underlying inherited diseases that could contribute to death. In many cases, sudden death is due to cardiac factors, but the type of cardiac dysfunction may depend on age.

Q&A column

September 2025
Q. Some of my laboratory staff are reluctant to reach out to the CAP with accreditation questions on checklist requirements because they fear that doing so will lead CAP inspectors to scrutinize those related items more closely during the next inspection. How does the College manage information from these phone calls? Read answer.

Q. An oncologist recently told me to perform a platelet count on a sodium citrate (blue top) tube even though the platelet results from the EDTA tube were valid—no platelet flags, a Q-flag value of zero, a normal platelet histogram, and no clumps seen on slide review. Based on this evidence, this patient is not an EDTA clumper and using the blue-top tube isn’t indicated or recommended, as far as I know. What is the science behind this request? There were platelet clumps in the blue-top tubes (platelet instrument flags and clumps seen on the slides from the citrate tubes), which further invalidated these results in my opinion as a licensed laboratory scientist. Read answer.

Newsbytes

September 2025—In his previous role as a pathologist at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, Dick Hwang, MD, PhD, was looking for a way to make his life—and his colleagues’ lives—easier. So he reached for something he hadn’t used in a while: his doctorate in computational biology. It was 2014, and Virginia Mason’s pathology group had just rolled out M*Modal Fluency Direct speech-recognition software as an optional tool for dictating diagnostic data. Dr. Hwang and many of his colleagues embraced the new software, but they soon realized that it meant they’d be spending a lot of time editing and formatting data. Entering a final diagnosis required, for example, typing “1.{tab}{caps lock},” dictating “cecum and ascending colon comma polypectomy,” then typing “:{caps lock}{return}{backspace}A.{tab}”—just as a start.

MARKETPLACE

TRENDING