Welcome to the MedLibrary.org Wikipedia Supplement on Armed Forces Institute of Pathology -- Please Click to Return to Front Page

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (August 2007)

The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) is a US government institution concerned with diagnostic consultation, education, and research. It was founded in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum and is located in Washington, DC on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It primarily provides second opinion diagnostic consultations on pathologic specimens, e.g. biopsies, from military, veteran, and civilian medical, dental, and veterinary sources. The unique character of the AFIP rests in the expertise of its civilian and military staff of diagnostic pathologists whose daily work consists of the study of cases that are difficult to diagnose owing to their rarity or their variation from the ordinary. The accumulation of such cases has resulted in a rich repository of lesions, numbering over three million, that have been the basis of major pathological studies. Examples are the published reports on the clinical, pathological and molecular characteristics of the relatively newly recognized gastrointestinal stromal tumors by M. Miettinen and colleagues*.

Another special feature of the AFIP is the interaction between its departments in analyzing complex cases. The AFIP's diagnostic departments are based on organ sites, e.g. dermatological, hepatic, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, pulmonary, soft tissue, bone, hematological, neurological, endocrine and gynecological pathology. In addition, there are specialty departments dealing with infectious and parasitic diseases, molecular techniques and environmental pathology. As all of these specialties are located in one institution, rapid collaborative examination of a case is facilitated and interdepartmental collaborative research is the rule rather than the exception.

Unique to the AFIP is the Department of Radiologic Pathology pursuing the interface between diagnostic radiology and anatomic pathology. This department is responsible for a course attended by virtually all North American radiologists in their training. A by-product is an unmatched repository of medical cases having extensive radiological images and pathological slides, a great source for studies in this field*. The educational mission of the Institute consists of formal courses providing continuing medical education (CME) credits for postgraduate medical personnel. A number of these courses have microscope slide study sets for individual examination by the participants as well as authoritative lectures by the AFIP and visiting staff. One to two year fellowships are available as are one month visits to individual departments.

Proposed disestablishment

The Base Realignment and Closure proposal for 2005 effects a realignment of the WRAMC campus including the disestablishment of AFIP with relocation of its "military relevant functions" to the NNMC, Bethesda, Maryland; Dover AFB, Delaware; and Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

The implications of the BRAC and reaction to it by the pathology world resulted in congressional legislation establishing a Joint Pathology Center (JPC) in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (NDAA 2008)[section 722]. This recognized the significant contributions of the AFIP and mandated the JPC to assume many of AFIP's resposibilities in consultation, education, and research, as well as the modernization of the repository.

References

• Henry R.S., The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology - Its First Century 1862 -1962, Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, Washington, DC 1964. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 63-60060.
  • Miettinen M, Sobin, LH, Lasota J. Gastrointestinal stromal tumors of the stomach. A clinicopathologic, immunohistochemical, and molecular genetic study of 1765 cases with long-term follow-up. Am J Surg Pathol 2005;29:52-68.
    • Levy AD, Taylor LD, Abbott RM, Sobin LH. Duodenal carcinoids: Imaging Features with Clinicopathologic Comparison. Radiology 2005;237:967-972.

External links

• Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
• Ask Rad Path Radiologic-Pathologic Correlation

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 24 November 2008, at 02:19.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Armed Forces Institute of Pathology".

The URL for this specific entry is:

• http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Armed_Forces_Institute_of_Pathology

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.