Medical Technology – Histopathology

Histopathology is the diagnosis and study of diseases of the tissues, and involves examining tissues
and/or cells under a microscope. Histopathologists are responsible for making tissue diagnoses and
helping clinicians manage a patient’s care.

Histopathology is the study of microscopic structures of tissues. Once a tissue sample is taken from a
patient, histology technicians are the people responsible for taking the sample and creating those
microscopic structures. After the samples are prepared, a pathologist will examine the slides for
diagnostic or research purposes.

Job Responsibilities and Duties

 Preparing thin slices of human, animal, or plant tissue on slides for analysis.
 Examining, fixing, and processing the tissue for proper sample preservation.
 Surrounding the tissue with paraffin wax in a process called embedding.
 Cutting a tissue sample with a microtome or cryostat.
 Mounting the tissue sample on a slide.
 Staining or dying the sample to emphasize abnormalities.
 Testing tissue according to what the pathologist needs.
 As needed, management of supplies and laboratory quality-control procedures.
 Work directly with patients, for example, they may carry out procedures such as fine needle
aspiration in head and neck or breast clinics. They increasingly have key responsibilities for
cancer screening, at the moment for breast, bowel and cervical cancer, with other programmers
expected in the near future.
 Examine cells in smears, aspirates or bodily fluids (cytopathology), for example in urine or
cervical smears. Other subspecialties include forensic pathology, neuropathology and pediatric
pathology.

Laboratory Tests
 Cryosectioning
- Is a method to rapidly freeze, cut, and mount sections of tissue for histology. The tissue is usually
sectioned on a cryostat or freezing microtome. The frozen sections are mounted on a glass slide
and may be stained to enhance the contrast between different tissues. Unfixed frozen sections
can be used for studies requiring enzyme localization in tissues and cells. Tissue fixation is required
for certain procedures such as antibody-linked immunofluorescence staining. Frozen sections are
often prepared during surgical removal of tumors to allow rapid identification of tumor margins,
as in Mohs surgery, or determination of tumor malignancy, when a tumor is discovered
incidentally during surgery.
 Ultramicrotomy
- Is a method of preparing extremely thin sections for transmission electron microscope (TEM)
analysis. Tissues are commonly embedded in epoxy or other plastic resin.[9] Very thin
sections (less than 0.1 micrometer in thickness) are cut using diamond or glass knives on
an ultramicrotome.