Pathology

Anatomic pathology is the science devoted to the study of diseased tissues. Tissues are usually obtained for study by a variety of methods, including skinny needle biopsies, incisional biopsies, excisional biopsies, and surgical resection of organs or tumors. The Department of Pathology at the Medical College of Wisconsin consists of 13 faculty members who specialize in various areas of tissue diagnosis.

 

The department has been organized along the lines of delivery of dedicated subspecialty services. What this means is that dedicated sub-specialists concentrate in specific areas or organ-systems to provide the most up-to-date and state-of-the-art diagnoses. The subspecialties include:

 

In addition, pediatric pathology services are provided by members of the department at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, and the department has an affiliation with the County’s Medical Examiner Office for the provision of forensic pathology services. Our autopsy pathology division is in charge of post-mortem examinations.

The provision of anatomic pathology services is carried out with the support of the technical services of Dynacare Laboratories, which is responsible for managing and staffing the technical personnel who work in the anatomic pathology lab. The anatomic pathology lab is a modern 2912 sq. feet facility housed in the Dynacare Lab Building on the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center campus adjacent to Froedtert Hospital, that includes a state-of-the-art histology laboratory, full-service immunohistochemistry laboratory, molecular pathology laboratory, cytogenetics laboratory, and an electron microscopy facility that is under the supervision of microbiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

The laboratory processes an average of 26,000 surgical specimens per year, 80,000 PAP smears, 5,000 non-GYN body fluids, and 1,500 fine needle aspiration cytologies. The immunohistochemistry lab performs approximately 28-30,000 stains per year.  A total of 150,586 tissue blocks are processed and 252,943 histologic glass slides are produced annually.