Tag Archives: CAP19 meeting

August 2020—Tumor budding is a robust prognostic marker that should be reported at least in pT1 and stage II colorectal carcinomas and taken into account with other risk factors. Further evidence is needed for tumor budding assessment in specimens taken after neoadjuvant therapy, says Heather Dawson, MD, senior staff GI pathologist at the Institute of Pathology, University of Bern in Switzerland.

July 2020—When patients who have colorectal cancer surgery at another institution seek further care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the Beth Israel pathologists routinely request the original slides. Raul S. Gonzalez, MD, a gastrointestinal pathologist at Beth Israel, says he usually agrees with everything the outside pathologist reports. But if there are differences, lymph nodes versus tumor deposits is one place where he might disagree.

February 2020—In vivo hemolysis accounts for less than two percent of cases of hemolysis, but don’t assume all hemolysis is in vitro. That was the point of one of the patient cases presented at CAP19 in a session on curbside consults in clinical pathology.

February 2020—At Massachusetts General Hospital, machine learning is being used in the laboratories to build next-level clinical decision support, and in the latest phase, it’s undergoing trial for use in predicting laboratory results. “I think this is the new paradigm for cost-effective laboratory medicine. This is an important way we’re going to change how we do business,” says Anand Dighe, MD, PhD, who spoke about machine learning techniques for labs during a CAP19 presentation last fall and in a recent interview with CAP TODAY.

January 2020—A molecular oncology tumor board session at CAP19 explored a case of cancer of unknown primary, presented by medical oncologist Alexander Drilon, MD, research director of early drug development at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Rondell P. Graham, MBBS, head of GI/liver pathology at Mayo Clinic Rochester.

December 2019—For point-of-care testing, perform proficiency testing on only one method or instrument unless your testing procedure says all patient samples must be tested on multiple instruments. And if a single IQCP is written for more than one POC testing location, account for all variations.

November 2019—Point-of-care testing makes up only about 10 percent of all laboratory testing but the aggravation factor and number of people involved far exceeds that, said Deborah A. Perry, MD, medical director of pathology at Methodist Hospital in Omaha, Neb., speaking at CAP19 and calling POC testing “a whole different world.”