Alexy Polivany

A surgical pathology specimen travels through more hands than most people realise. It arrives from the operating room or clinic, gets accessioned, assigned a case number, logged, transported to the gross room, dissected, placed into cassettes, processed overnight, embedded in paraffin, sectioned, stained, mounted, and finally presented to a pathologist for diagnosis. At each one of those steps, a human being handles something that must remain correctly identified and correctly attributed to...

Every cytology case that gets signed out as negative carries an implicit claim: a trained professional reviewed this material, found nothing actionable, and the patient can be managed accordingly. That claim rests entirely on human attention — and human attention is variable. It varies by screener experience, by time of day, by workload, by the monotony of reviewing slide after slide of normal material. The literature on screening fatigue in cytology is substantial. The consequence when...

Every pathology department in a hospital already has a laboratory information system. The LIS receives orders, routes results, and feeds the EMR. For the hospital, it is infrastructure — as fundamental as the network or the payroll system. For the IT team, it is a solved problem. This is precisely why the question is so often framed the wrong way. When a head of pathology requests a LIMS, the conversation is rarely about whether the current system works. It works. Results are delivered....