Quality control of patholgy diagnosis
Pathology diagnosis often becomes a final diagnosis for patients with cancer. Important information can be extracted from pathology specimen by pathologists and clinicians use this information as their guidance for clinical decision making. Although pathology diagnosis is important and useful, it suffers from a lack of objective criteria of diagnosis. This fact sometimes causes a significant discrepancy in diagnostic criteria among pathologists and laboratories. It has been demonstrated that the degree of discrepancy is significant enough to cause opposite diagnoses for difficult cases (e.g., benign vs. malignant). In order to minimize the discrepancy, quality control efforts, such as internal and external consultations, postgraduate education and application of objective methods (flow cytometry and image analysis), are necessary. In addition, the author has demonstrated that quality control of pathology diagnosis is required for multi-institutional clinical trials in which cases are collected from several institutions.
