Slide, tissue block repository ties past to AI’s future
September 2025—The largest repository of pathology slides and tissue blocks is becoming a powerful data repository with the promise to transform diagnosis and treatment through the use of artificial intelligence. When U.S. military operations of all kinds were slashed or shuttered in 2008 under the Base Realignment and Closure federal initiative, a massive U.S. Army repository of slides and tissue blocks—including gross specimens dating back to the Civil War—came close to being one of the victims. It was housed at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which had been targeted for closure. “When BRAC happened, and all of these Department of Defense facilities were closed, they didn’t know what to do with their pathology tissues,” says Mark D. Lyman, MD, Colonel, Medical Corps, U.S. Air Force, and director of the Joint Pathology Center (JPC), Silver Spring, Md. “There was even some discussion about throwing the repository away.”