Pathology Informatics

Pathology Informatics Overview

Pathology Informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital is organized into a service arm, a fellowship program, a clinical clerkship and twelve fully independent faculty members, each with independent research facilities, funding and points of view.

Major centers of research interest include:

• Pathology Imaging
• Integration of Anatomic and Clinical Pathology Systems
• Pathology support for bio-repositories
• Cancer Outcomes
• Pathology communications across the entire total testing cycle, especially
  at the key levers of test ordering, interpretation and outcomes

Pathology Informatics Fellowship

Mass General supports a formal Clinical Fellowship in Pathology Informatics that seeks to train pathologists to become leaders in Informatics and imaging. Our educational philosophy considers informatics a part of pathology practice and central to pathology’s future, and our program’s architecture provides exposure to a wide variety of clinical operations, research consistent with long term career goals, a national vision, multiple, independent faculty, and a level of responsibility appropriate to experience and skill.

Clinical Clerkship in Pathology Informatics 

The Clinical Clerkship in Pathology Informatics course will introduce students to the challenges and accomplishments in Pathology Informatics, while simultaneously providing integrated exposure to several subspecialty areas within the pathology department (i.e. surgical pathology, molecular pathology, cytopathology, laboratory medicine, etc.).

Pathology Informatics Faculty

The interests of our faculty range across the entire spectrum of pathology informatics. Each faculty member has independent facilities and funding. While most of our faculty are based at Mass General, several of our faculty are based in other institutions and are related through shared collaborations, projects and systems.

Anand Dighe, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor
Harvard Medical School
Director of the MGH Core Laboratory
Assistant Director of Pathology Informatics
Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Dighe's expertise is in the development of information and decision support systems that supplement the LIS's functionality across the entire total testing cycle. His research and development projects focus on the role of the clinical lab at order entry and result interpretation, web-based applications for clinician education, the role of search engines in clinical information systems, the role of informatics in laboratory management, the development of expert systems for laboratory test selection. He is the leader of the online laboratory handbook system.

James Michaelson, PhD
Associate Professor
Harvard Medical School
Departments of Surgical Oncology and Pathology
Massachusetts General Hospital|

Dr. Michaelson is Director of Laboratory for Quantitative Medicine and LifeMath.net at MGH. His group has expertise in the development and management of long term outcomes data and the use of that data in preventive medicine, analysis of cancer survival and health communications.

Gary J. Tearney, MD, PhD
Professor of Pathology
Harvard Medical School
Department of Dermatology and Pathology
Faculty, MGH Wellman Center for Photomedicine
Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Tearney's research at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine has contributed substantially to a new imaging modality, optical coherence tomography (OCT). OCT provides cross-sectional images of tissue microstructure at a resolution of 10 µm. In addition, his lab is developing an endoscopic confocal microscopy system that is capable of obtaining images at a resolution of 1.0 µm through an endoscope accessory port.

David C. Wilbur, MD
Professor of Pathology
Harvard Medical School
Director of Clinical Imaging,
Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Wilbur is Director of Clinical Imaging at Mass General. His Cytopathology Imaging Facility focuses in the development and implementation of computerization in cytopathology, including automated screening, telecytology, whole slide imaging in cytology including validation of instrumentation and protocols.

Bruce A. Beckwith, MD
Chief of Laboratory Medicine
Department of Pathology
Salem Hospital, Salem, MA

Dr. Beckwith is Chief of Laboratory Medicine at Salem Hospital, a hospital of the Mass General Brigham. He has extensive experience in operational informatics, bio-repository informatics and pathology imaging. He is the Chairman of DICOM Working Group 26 (Pathology) and is a member of the CAP Informatics Committee.

Lynn Bry, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor,
Harvard Medical School
Associate Medical Director, Clinical Laboratories
Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Dr. Bry is an expert in tissue collection and bio-repositories and the Director of the Crimson Bio-Specimen Core in the Mass General Brigham. She is also the founder of the Mad Scientist Network, a web-based "ask a scientist" service that has been active since 1995.