Jiaoti Huang, MD, PhD, chaired the Educational Session, “Pathology for Cancer Researchers,” at the annual American Association for Cancer Research conference in New Orleans on Sat., April 9. During the session, a panel of pathologists reviewed the important and evolving role of pathology in cancer research and discussed how advances in technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), are improving the accuracy and specificity of tumor assessment.
Huang provided an overview of how tumors are pathologically assessed and characterized. He emphasized that the key to determining a prognosis and staging of the cancer is achieving accuracy in classifying and grading tumors.
“A given organ can give rise to multiple different tumor types, and classification is generally based on morphology,” said Huang. “But, these days, molecular changes and genetic alterations are often considered together with morphology to help us form an accurate classification,” Huang said. “Classification has important clinical significance because different tumors have different biological behaviors, and the prognosis and treatment differ accordingly. Similarly, when it comes to grading, two different patients can have the same tumor type but their prognosis can be very different due to different grades of tumors. Additionally, different tumors in different organs have different grading systems.”
Beatrice S. Knudsen, MD, PhD, University of Utah, was also on the panel and gave a presentation about the growing field of computational pathology and the utilization of pathomics, which combines AI and digitalized pathology to analyze histopathology images.
Angelo Michael De Marzo, MD, PhD, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, concluded the session with a look at how molecular pathology tools are leading to novel insights and informing tissue-based genomics in cancer. He focused on prostate cancer precursor and advanced lesions to showcase molecular, pathology-based tools and approaches used to inform, guide, and complement genomic approaches.
Read more on the American Association for Cancer Research’s site.