Abstract
Endomyocardial biopsy is widely adopted as an important examination process for the diagnosis of allograft rejection after heart transplantation. The initial standardized grading system was instituted by the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) in 1990 and was used for over 10 years. Some discrepancies between the pathologic findings and clinical conditions were indicated according to the development of new knowledge and therapy for rejection in the Banff and ISHLT meetings, and the revised grading system was demonstrated in 2004. In this revision, the grading of cellular rejection was largely modified to more standardized diagnose everywhere, and the simple grading for antibody mediated rejection (AMR) started being used. The treatment for AMR has been the major topic in Banff and ISHLT meetings, and the current pathologic grading of AMR was published in 2013. More data will be accumulated soon in relation to this topic.
