Pathology

The Department of Pathology of the Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University was established in 2004. With the close support of hospital leadership at all levels and the efforts of all members of the department, it has undergone leapfrog development. Today it is a pathology department that integrates clinical service, teaching and research, has a mature professional team, and enjoys considerable influence and a recognised professional profile within the province.

The department now has 12 physicians (1 with a senior professional title and 6 with associate senior titles). Its annual workload is growing by 10–15%; it currently handles about 49,000 tissue pathology cases and more than 20,000 cytopathology cases a year. In addition to conventional histopathology techniques, molecular pathology techniques are now fully applied to diagnosis and differential diagnosis and to support the clinical use of targeted drugs. As the pathology teaching and research office of Harbin Medical University, the department has one doctoral supervisor and one master's supervisor and has trained more than ten master's students. As one of the first standardised residency training bases in Harbin, it has trained 23 residents, with 10 residents currently in training receiving systematic pathology diagnostic training within the department. It has hosted two national continuing education programmes and has run several provincial training courses for pathologists, making a major contribution to raising the overall professional level of primary-care pathologists in Heilongjiang Province and earning unanimous praise from peers across the province.

As a medical unit combining clinical service, teaching and research, the department attaches importance to research while carrying a heavy clinical and teaching workload. To date it has successfully applied for more than ten provincial and municipal research projects and published more than 40 papers, of which more than 10 are indexed in SCI.