Mark D. Pool

About Mark D. Pool

Biggest challenge in pathology? The biggest challenge to the pathology field currently is a shortage of pathologists and laboratory scientists to adequately staff laboratories simply to meet existing workload demands, let alone future demands – even accounting for increases in automation and augmented (artificial) intelligence (AI).

Exciting developments and trends? The most exciting emerging trend in pathology is applying AI to the massive amount of information generated by the laboratory. We are very good at generating a great deal of data but have not had the tools available until now to turn this into information--both at the individual and population level. AI can help leverage this data but it is not going to be an immediately actionable thing – it will take time to evaluate and improve models.

Controversial opinion? Pathologists, and physicians in general, must scorn the recent tendency to focus on producing outcomes, which often have political or sociological dimensions, by selectively choosing only data that supports predetermined conclusions and ignoring contradictory data or disparaging alternate interpretations. We have to be rigorous about collecting data and logically interpreting this data without attachment to conclusions that we may desire.