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The Editorial Board of VHJOE is extremely excited to introduce a new section to the journal entitled, "Cases From the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP)."
Dr. Sobin and his faculty at the AFIP provide expert pathology consultation on exotic and difficult cases referred from across the globe. As they share their most fascinating case materials with us, the readers of VHJOE, will surely come to understand why Dr. Sobin and his faculty are an invaluable and irreplaceable intellectual treasure to the field of Medicine and Gastrointestinal Pathology.
Dr. Leslie H. Sobin was born in New York City, received his Bachelor of Science degree from Union College in 1955 and his medical degree from the State University of New York at N.Y.C. in 1959. He did his residency in Anatomic Pathology at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center where he rose to Assistant Professor. From 1965 to 1968 he served as WHO Professor of Pathology at the University of Kabul, Afghanistan after which he returned to Cornell as Associate Professor of Pathology. He rejoined WHO in 1970 as Pathologist and was responsible for the WHO International Histological Classification of Tumors.
In 1981 he joined the staff of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC where he rose to Chief of Gastrointestinal Pathology, Co-chair of the Department of Hepatic and Gastrointestinal Pathology and Director of Scientific Publications. He continued his work on the WHO tumor classification series as head of a WHO Collaborating Center at the AFIP. He has been co-editor of the third and fourth series of the AFIP Atlas of Tumor Pathology. As Chairman of the TNM Prognostic Factors Project of the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) for over 20 years, he co-edited the TNM Classification of Malignant Tumors in its 4th, 5th and 6th editions.
Dr. Sobin is author or coauthor of over 300 scientific articles, chapters, and books among which were the AFIP Atlas of Intestinal Tumors and the Atlas of Endoscopy and Endoscopic Biopsies of the Gastrointestinal Tract. Among his publications are: articles on staging of cancer, classification of tumors, epidemiology of gastrointestinal cancer, and pathology of GISTs; chapters on the appendix, gastrointestinal polyps and tumors. He published three books of verse on pathology: A Pathology Primer- in verse, Tales of the Ampulla of Vater, and The Prosector's Guide to the Autopsy.
He has been the Director of the AFIP's annual course on Endoscopic Biopsies of the Gastrointestinal Tract for over 15 years.
Peter R. McNally, DO, FACP, FACG
Editorial Board, VHJOE
UCHSC, Center for Human Simulation
Guest Commentary
Editor of Cases from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Dr. Sobin
The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) was founded in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum. It is located in Washington, DC on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Its primary mission is second opinion diagnostic consultations on pathologic specimens that are usually difficult to diagnose due to their rarity or their variation from the ordinary. These cases have resulted in a unique repository of lesions, numbering over three million, that have been the basis of major pathological studies.
The AFIP's diagnostic departments are based mainly on organ sites, e.g.
skin, liver, 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, there is close interaction between its departments in analyzing complex cases.
The educational mission of the Institute consists of formal courses and "hands-on" study of materials in courses as well as in specialty departments where one to two year fellowships are available as are one month visits.
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 cases having extensive radiological images and pathological slides, a great source for studies in this field and the origin of the cases that will be presented in this series.
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