Abstract
The pathology report should provide accurate diagnostic, prognostic and predictive information, including information about completeness of resection, according to timeliness required for tissue-processing without delaying clinical care. The pathology report should deliver unambiguous communication between the pathologists and the clinicians, but also emphasizing unusual or biologically divergent findings that might influence clinical management and disease understanding.
The pathological report is often expected to provide the “absolute truth”. However, even with the addition of molecular pathology, including biomarkers and multigene tests, the findings are not exhaustive and should be evaluated in the context of the individual patient, discussed and reviewed if needed in the multidisciplinary setting, with a pathologist taking active part in the discussion and indicating the limitation of the pathological evaluation.
For novel biomarkers including multigene tests to be clinically implementable, clinical as well as analytical validity needs to be consolidated. While some biomarkers show prognostic/predictive information in population-based studies, they may currently not be sufficiently reproducible for clinical use.
The pathologist is responsible for staying up-to-date with optimal evaluation of biomarkers and for interpreting the increasingly complex, combined biological picture and presenting it as precisely as possible to the clinicians in order to provide a basis for subsequent treatment decisions.
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Tramm, T., Moinfar, F. (2022). Pathology Report. In: Kaidar-Person, O., Meattini, I., Poortmans, P. (eds) Breast Cancer Radiation Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91170-6_8
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