pathtalk.org is a weblog about pathology and laboratory medicine.

Bacterial communication systems: An eventual drug target?

Bonnie Bassler from Princeton’s Department of Molecular Biology spoke at a recent TED conference on mechanisms of bacterial communication. She explained her group’s discovery that bacteria commnuicate with one another using special “quorum-sensing” molecules which allow them to act in unison, much as the cells in a multicellular organism do. Their discoveries [...]

Virtual slide viewer powered by the Google Maps API

A team at the NYU School of Medicine’s Division of Educational Informatics has created a brilliant implementation of a virtual slide viewer using the Google Maps API. They are using their viewer to view digital slides acquired using Bacus and Aperio slide scanners.  In my opinion, this is superior in some ways to the [...]

Painful ulcers on the hard palate

Clinical history
A 35-year-old man presented with multiple painful ulcerations on his hard palate.

B-cell clonality: Recurrent lymphoma?

Clinical History and Pathological Findings
An elderly woman presented with mild anemia and was found to have a positive fecal occult blood test and a positive serum anti-H. pylori IgG antibody test. Endoscopy was performed, and several superficial gastric and duodenal ulcers were biopsied.

B-cell IgH PCR revealed a clonal B-cell population, and the diagnosis of [...]

Biopsy Anxiety

One of my colleagues just pointed out this interesting post from the New York Times Well Blog. It’s a commentary on a recent paper published in the journal Radiology which followed cortisol levels of women waiting for breast biopsy results. Predictably, they found that waiting and uncertainty was correlated with higher cortisol levels. [...]

Hepatitis in a Lung Transplant Recipient

Clinical Presentation
A 33 year-old woman with cystic fibrosis who underwent bilateral orthotopic lung transplantation twelve weeks ago presented to the emergency department complaining of increasingly severe right upper quadrant pain of one week’s duration. Physical examination was remarkable for moderate jaundice and marked right upper quadrant tenderness to palpation. Liver function testing revealed [...]