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What's New in the Labs

See the Clinical Laboratories pages under "News & Publications" for notices regarding changes in lab policies and services.

Team Excellence Award Presented to Surgical Pathology's Rapid Tissue Acquisition Team

At this year's Medical Center Board meeting, a Team Excellence Award was presented to the Surgical Pathology Unit’s Rapid Tissue Acquisition Team, which has been collaborating with Operating Room (OR) staff to standardize its process for collecting specimens (aiming to more accurately label and document tissue samples, as well as transport them to the lab sooner). This team – headed up by Surgical Pathology’s director, David Hicks, M.D., and operational coordinator, Robyn Sage – armed pathology technicians with cell phones, and asked the OR team to call these techs the moment a specimen was ready for retrieval. Read more...

Histopathology Lab Plans Microwave Technology Workshop with Award from National Society for Histotechnology

At the NSH annual meeting in Denver, the University of Rochester histopathology laboratory won the $1,000 Franco Visinoni Chief Dreamer Laboratory Award for the use of laboratory microwave technology to improve patient care and enhance laboratory operations. The award will be used to support a one-day workshop on microwave technology, planned for the summer of 2008.

Charles Churukian, long-time director of special stains, was instrumental in implementing microwave methods for tissue staining at Rochester. A number of microwave methods are included in his manual.

In 2005 and 2006, the histopathology lab received funding from the Friends of Strong, the Hospital's volunteer organization, to purchase a microwave tissue processor and enhancements to it. With this equipment, the lab was able to decrease turnaround times on post-transplant biopsies, on a wide variety of small tissue specimens, and most recently on bone marrow biopsies. The workshop will include presentations on technique, quality, and the future of microwave technology in tissue pathology. Contact Diana Scott, lab supervisor, for information on this implementation or to be added to list for e-mailings regarding the workshop.

EM Core Receives Grant for Purchase of New Electron Microscope

Karen Bentley, M.S., Director of the URMC Electron Microscope Research Core, has been awarded a Department of Defense (DoD)/Air Force grant totally $395,000 for the purchase of a new Analytical Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM). This award will provide the Core with a 100% dedicated microscope (previously they were sharing use of a clinical TEM in our Renal Pathology Lab.).  The new microscope will have a unique compound objective lens providing quality imaging for magnifications ranging between 200-600,000x; an imaging field rotation +/- 90 o  between 1000-40,000x; a LaB6 emitter (instead of tungsten) for brighter illumination at high magnifications; and a “state of the art” image capture system using an 11 megapixel Gatan digital camera with image archiving software. Since the majority of researchers request support involving routine morphologic examination of cell and tissue specimens, all of these features will provide them with much higher quality digital electron microscopic imaging files for subsequent publications, grant applications and posters. 

To support the University’s emerging interdisciplinary research field of nanotechnology and biotechnology, important analytical features are attached to this electronmicroscope.  These include Electron Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDS) for elemental microanalysis and a combined Scanning/Transmission (STEM) mode for darkfield imaging of nanoparticles present in biologic cells or tissue.  URMC already has an established five year DoD/Air Force Nanotoxicology MURI (multi-university research initiative) with Gunter Oberdorster, Ph.D. as the principal investigator.  The new analytical TEM will allow examination of cells and tissue to document uptake and translocation of 5-50 nm manmade nanoparticles such as Copper, Gold, Titanium and Manganese with additional elemental confirmation of  any “suspect” nanoparticles visually identified using brightfield TEM and darkfield STEM modes.