The immunohistochemical investigation was blind, i.e. the slides were coded and pathologist did not have prior knowledge of the local tumor burden, lymphonodular spread and grading of the OSCCs while scoring the immunoreactivity.
Interestingly, despite the relatively large numbers of clinicians recognizing the utility of autopsy in their clinical practice, there seemed to be almost no communication between clinicians and pathologists – pathologists do not go to mortality meetings, and clinicians do not go to autopsies.
For example, NTP and other veterinary toxicology pathologists do not use the diagnostic term "prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia" or "Gleason scores" that are used in experimental biology and in clinical practice because proliferative prostate lesions are so rare in their rodent models.
Deshmukh and Foster (1998) argue that some pathologists do not identify milder forms of grade 3 PRCA and label it instead as grade 2. In this study, no PRCAs were found to have a Gleason score less than 6.
Pathologists do not presently use the "experimental" research designs so admired by advocates of EBM.
A third reason is that pathologists do not examine every millimeter of the tissue removed in a biopsy.
How Bayoh died has still to be determined, although positional asphyxia that restraint by police officers prevented him from breathing adequately suspected. Pathologists do not yet have the full information necessary to confirm this because, until last week, they were unable to get statements from the officers involved, despite having made "several attempts" to do so.
Importantly, the FIGO classification does not include LVSI, because pathologists do not always agree on whether LVSI is present (Pecorelli et al, 2009).
Highly trained pathologists don't do as good a job as image analysis software at diagnosing breast cancer.
"I saw a lot of things that many pathologists don't see in a lifetime," she says.
