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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

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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

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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

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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

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Columns

From the President’s Desk

July 2025—Whether we’re in academic or private practice, hospital labs or independent labs, as pathologists we share a broad set of common responsibilities and challenges. But a select group of us has an additional set of considerations for how to practice because of who and where they serve. In this month’s column, I’d like to shine a light on military pathologists and pathologists who serve our veterans in the Veterans Affairs health system—all of whom are supporting the defense of our country.

Clinical pathology selected abstracts

July 2025—A large number of cancers remain undetected until later stages, including lung, colorectal, cervical, ovarian, pancreatic, and prostate cancers. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends screening based on age and other risk factors. It is estimated that more than 4 million cancers have been avoided due to early screening methods. Efforts are being made to develop cancer-screening tests that are easier to perform and less invasive and that detect multiple types of cancer, with the intent of reducing cancer-related morbidity and mortality. Multicancer early detection (MCED) assays depend on circulating cell-free DNA to detect a shared single cancer signal.

Anatomic pathology selected abstracts

July 2025—Intraductal oncocytic papillary neoplasm of the pancreas is a recently recognized pancreatic tumor. The authors conducted a study to generate a comprehensive and quantitative summary of various aspects of intraductal oncocytic papillary neoplasms (IOPN). They searched the PubMed, Scopus, and Embase databases for studies reporting on pancreatic IOPN. Clinicopathologic, immunohistochemical, and molecular data were extracted from the studies and summarized. A comparative analysis of the molecular alterations of IOPN in juxtaposition with the typical molecular profile of conventional pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm from reference cohorts was subsequently conducted.

Molecular pathology selected abstracts

July 2025—Liver damage can result in a build up of scar tissue, or fibrosis, a hallmark of chronic liver disease (CLD). The latter has been attributed to a variety of risk factors, including viruses (primarily hepatitis B and C), obesity, and alcohol abuse. Furthermore, some patients have a genetic predisposition for the disease. Alpha-1 antitrypsin (A1AT) deficiency and hereditary hemochromatosis are two such inherited disorders that cause hepatocyte stress and damage. In A1AT deficiency, mutations in the SERPINA1 gene produce abnormal variants of the A1AT protein, which can accumulate in the liver and lead to hepatocyte damage. Mutations in the HFE gene are responsible for hereditary hemochromatosis.

Pathology informatics selected abstracts

July 2025—Computational pathology has largely focused on analyzing tissue slides and overlooked worthwhile information in gross images. Recognizing this, the authors introduced a novel deep learning model based on Swin Transformer architecture and called Swin Transformer-based Gross Features Detective Network (SGFD-network). They sought to summarize and classify the gross examination characteristics of ovarian epithelial tumors by analyzing images of gross specimens using this deep learning approach. The SGFD-network is especially useful for distinguishing borderline tumors with microinvasive components from frank carcinomas. This capability is crucial during frozen section analysis, in which limited sampling and time pressures often challenge diagnostic accuracy.

Q&A column

July 2025
Q. What is the best way to check machine precision? Is it acceptable to run precision replicates in quality control mode? Read answer.

Q. Several molecular diagnostic vendors circulate across U.S. hospitals and clinics to provide collection kits to physicians and request that those physicians refer tests outside the institution for what is sometimes described as clinical trials or research. The vendors operate using a pharmaceutical company model of selling proprietary testing directly to physicians and patients and bypassing the laboratory. It is a problem because laboratories are often expected to collect and submit samples and then enter complex reports into the electronic health record.

These companies are farming health systems for business and bypassing the accreditation process. When the testing is used not for research but instead for “the purpose of providing information for the diagnosis, prevention, or treatment of any disease or impairment of, or the assessment of the health of, human beings,” under U.S. law it is defined as laboratory testing (section 353 of the Public Health Service Act, 42 USC §263a), which is overseen by pathology laboratories and under pathology’s accreditation. Under this legal definition of laboratory testing, those outsourced tests are not research.

Can you comment on this practice from an accreditation perspective? Read answer.

Newsbytes

July 2025—PathAI and Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine have entered a multi-year venture in which Northwestern will implement PathAI’s AISight digital pathology image-management system. The two entities will also jointly undertake research initiatives and develop clinical innovation programs and artificial intelligence-powered diagnostic tools.

Put It on the Board

July 2025—The length of time to install digital pathology equipment, interface, implement, train, and go live in 10 large laboratories ranged from under one year to about 18 months, and the time spent prior to that—evaluating options, gaining budget approval, making decisions, and completing the contract and negotiation process—took eight months to a year for seven of the 10. For two others, the evaluation, decision-making, and contracting process took about 18 months, and for one it took five years, largely owing to pandemic-related delay.

Shorts on Standards: Regenstrief Institute and SNOMED International release 1st version of LOINC ontology

June 2025—Laboratories are subject to rigorous federal regulations such as continuous quality control, proficiency testing, and laboratory inspections to ensure high-quality test performance. However, few government mandates exist for the standardization of laboratory data. As a result, different laboratories have various local codes, names, reference ranges for normal and abnormal values, and formats of results and associated units for laboratory tests that might otherwise be similar or identical. While the lack of standardization is unlikely to impact the daily operations of individual laboratories, it does pose a significant barrier when results are compared or aggregated across institutions. It also poses challenges for secondary uses such as public health surveillance, outcomes analysis, research, and artificial intelligence/machine learning development.

From the President’s Desk

June 2025—June marks the American Medical Association’s annual meeting of its House of Delegates, and I’d like to use this month’s column to focus on why it’s so important for pathologists to work closely with the AMA. The short answer is this: We need to be at the table in the greater house of medicine. But isn’t it enough to be part of the CAP? After all, we are pathologists, and the CAP is far more focused on issues specific to our practice and our patients. And the CAP is constantly advocating for us at the federal and state levels of government, as well as with private payers.

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