Editors: Raymond D. Aller, MD & Dennis Winsten
How one medical school is giving histology-based education a boost
July 2026—Dedicated training in histology is increasingly getting short shrift as many academic medical institutions nationwide move to an organ system-based teaching structure. Recognizing this trend, a group of faculty and residents at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health are employing creativity, a simple software program, and a bit of teamwork to boost medical students’ exposure to the specialty.
By 2016, medical students at the university had gone from participating in histology and pathology courses as part of the curriculum to attending occasional lectures pertaining to these areas and accessing case-based learning sessions at their discretion as a result of the medical school having shifted to a teaching structure that focused more heavily on clinical exposure.
“All of this is to say that we needed a curriculum that supported the basics of histomorphology so that our students could understand what we are previewing at the scope so it could be a more productive learning session,” says Alex Tannenbaum, MD, chief resident of the anatomic and clinical pathology program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
To that end, Dr. Tannenbaum and Erin Brooks, MD, vice chair of education at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, as well as other faculty and residents in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, developed and are now refining an anatomic pathology curriculum that integrates asynchronous modular histology content for independent study with service-based pathology rotations. The rotations include, among other tasks, previewing cases with residents, signing out cases with faculty, observing frozen sections and grossing, assisting with autopsy prosections, and attending daily quality assurance conferences.
The curriculum design team recognized that medical students could not, for instance, “spend eight hours standing behind the grossing resident,” Dr. Tannenbaum says. “So we developed a robust catalog of independent-learning asynchronous modules that fill in the gaps when we’re on service—it’s a perfect use of everyone’s time.”
The modules, designed in PowerPoint and ranging from 14 to 16 slides, are assigned to students rotating through the program and made available via the Canvas learning-management system, which has built-in knowledge checks, or quizzes, with the goal of taking learners through a case from grossing to assessing microscopic findings. They contain educational content presented as bullet points and histologic images. PowerPoint animations taken from in-house collections or open-access sources were used to annotate the images and support self-guided learning.
“Between PowerPoint and Canvas, we’re able to add all the features and bells and whistles that we want to,” Dr. Brooks says.
The modules include an introduction to basic histology that focuses on such topics as architectural patterns and cellular and cytoplasmic features, as well as histology topics that align with the surgical pathology subspecialty sign-out services to which UW medical students are most commonly assigned for rotations, including breast/gynecologic, pediatric, tubular gut, genitourinary, head/neck, endocrine, and hepatobiliary/pancreas. They also highlight organ systems or relevant diseases within those areas.
The modular content gives students a baseline understanding, “so they have the satisfaction of knowing what they’re looking at and are more engaged right from the beginning,” says Dr. Tannenbaum. “Anecdotally, on the first day of my sitting with my medical students, they were able to correctly identify invasive ductal carcinoma and, not only that, but correctly identify what workup we do to prove it—something I had never experienced before.”
The program creators also devised modified hard-copy bingo cards to guide students toward learning about the “bread-and-butter pathologies” that all medical students should know for each of their subspecialty rotations, Dr. Brooks says. The bingo cards are distributed to students at the beginning of their rotations on a service. For example, the bingo card for the genitourinary, head and neck, and endocrine service contains squares for prostatic adenocarcinoma, urothelial cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and parathyroid adenoma, among others.
The bingo cards “are part and parcel of the modules [and] based on what subspecialty sign-out the student is assigned to,” Dr. Brooks adds. “So each individual subspecialty has one to two bingo cards, depending on what focus the faculty wants the students to have.” Although students are assigned to specialties in two-week rotation blocks, they can complete any module and corresponding bingo card at any time and are encouraged to do so.
As medical students prepare to start the anatomic pathology curriculum, a faculty point person meets with them individually to discuss expectations relative to learning histology content, give them a bingo card, explain how the card and modular content work, and inquire about their educational goals so they can guide them to relevant educational activities and specialty-specific conferences at the medical school.
The new program was “rolled out piecemeal as we were putting materials together” because it required a tremendous amount of collaboration across departments, Dr. Tannenbaum says. Consequently, students could directly compare the new educational offerings with the old curricula model, and the program team could evaluate what worked best on an ongoing basis. Surveys were sent to students a week after they finished their rotations, and the results were published in an Academic Pathology article detailing the fluid rotation model (Tannenbaum A, et al. Published online Oct. 7, 2025. doi.org/10.1016/j.acpath.2025.100225).
“Now that we have a baseline comparison, and students indicate a preference for the new curricular model, this can be amended easily with the completion and release of content into services that currently lack it,” according to the article. “In addition, new content can be added to address some of the specifically mentioned learner interests, such as resources on microscope use.”
Being able to modify the curriculum based on user feedback was a critical reason why the design team opted not to use online resources but instead develop their own program. “Building from the ground up gave us a level of personalization specific to our department and our needs and gave us the ability to own all the materials that we used,” explains Dr. Tannenbaum. “Therefore, we could change them on a dime or alter them significantly.”
The survey data and the fact that more students at UW are rotating into pathology suggest the new curriculum is meeting the team’s objectives. Consequently, new modules are being built, based in part on the results of the post-rotation surveys, and bone, soft tissue, and thoracic modules will be unveiled with the next cohort of students this upcoming school year.
The number one area of constructive feedback in the curriculum survey was students saying they want more, Dr. Tannenbaum says. “They want additional content and more practice opportunities to go along with that content. I think that’s a great result and a big thumbs up that we’re doing something right.”
—Brenda Lange
Artera earns FDA clearance for risk-stratification tool
Artera’s ArteraAI Breast digital pathology-based risk-stratification tool has received FDA clearance for use in patients with early-stage hormone receptor-positive/HER2-negative invasive breast cancer.
Using digitized histopathology images and patient-specific clinical variables, the artificial intelligence-based model creates a risk score for stratifying patients with early-stage HR-positive/HER2-negative breast cancer into low- and high-risk groups based on the likelihood of developing distant metastases.
Artera, 650-239-7018
Tempus AI develops consortium with Memorial Sloan Kettering and Yale New Haven Hospital
Tempus AI, a technology company that leverages artificial intelligence and multimodal medical data to advance precision medicine, has joined forces with Yale New Haven Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to create the digital pathology IMS Open-Source Consortium, or IMS Consortium.
“Designed to accelerate the democratization and standardization of digital pathology, the consortium aims to bring together leading academic medical centers and industry partners to develop a best-in-class open-source digital pathology platform and viewer” and thereby provide a clinical-grade baseline solution to institutions globally, according to a press release from Tempus.
As founding members of the consortium, Yale New Haven and Memorial Sloan Kettering will be involved in defining the vision, governance, and strategic direction of the open-source, scalable, and interoperable digital pathology ecosystem. Tempus will provide its Paige image-management system, including its FullFocus slide viewer, FullFolio case-management solution, and AI orchestration and integration modules, as open-source offerings to seed the ecosystem.
The consortium plans to add members over time.
Proscia launches new generation of Concentriq
Proscia has introduced the fifth generation of its Concentriq artificial intelligence-driven pathology software platform.
This latest version provides a new AI-native architecture to bring clinically and scientifically grounded intelligence to pathologists and scientists involved in patient case review and drug discovery and development.
“This architecture enables the platform to unify images, metadata, and the context surrounding a case or study—from slide-level morphology and patient history to laboratory-specific protocols and translational data—giving experts and models the same complete picture,” according to a company press release.
Proscia, 215-608-5411
Mayo Clinic and Microsoft partner on AI model
Mayo Clinic and Microsoft have announced a strategic collaboration to develop and deploy a frontier artificial intelligence model that combines Mayo Clinic’s de-identified clinical data and longitudinal insights with Microsoft’s AI, cloud, engineering, and superintelligence capabilities.
The model, which is designed to synthesize diverse clinical data to support earlier diagnoses and more personalized treatment decisions, will be owned by Mayo Clinic. “The model is being purpose-built for health care and initially deployed within Mayo Clinic’s trusted clinical environment, where it can be continuously tested, refined, and improved through real-world use,” according to a Microsoft press statement.
Microsoft plans to eventually make the model available via its Azure Foundry application programming interfaces.
Grundium acquires Visiopharm
The Finnish digital microscope slide scanner company Grundium Oy has acquired the Denmark-based artificial intelligence-driven precision pathology software company Visiopharm A/S as part of its strategy to build a broader digital and computational pathology platform.
“By combining Grundium’s scanner portfolio with Visiopharm’s AI-driven software, the platform supports a broad range of use cases, from individual laboratory workflows to enterprise-scale deployments, biomarker development, translational research, clinical studies, and companion diagnostic programs,” according to a joint statement from the companies.
The vendors, which had entered into an earlier partnership to integrate Grundium’s Ocus scanners with Visiopharm’s Qualitopix digital pathology platform, will continue to offer and support their solutions independently, “enabling customers to continue with their current solutions or combine capabilities as their needs evolve,” the companies reported.
Both vendors market products in the United States.
PRW Laboratories first to deploy new Leica scanner
Charlottesville, Va.-based PRW Laboratories, operating in partnership with the independent physician services company Versant Diagnostics, has become the first laboratory to deploy Leica Biosystems’ Aperio GT Elite digital pathology scanner.
Deployment at PRW, a provider of dermatopathology and surgical pathology services, builds on a longstanding digital pathology collaboration between Leica and Versant, according to a press announcement from Leica.
The Aperio GT Elite is available for research use only.
Leica Biosystems, 844-534-2262