Pathology

The Department of Pathology of Peking University People’s Hospital was established in 1955. It was founded by Professor Guo Qianxin at the initiative of Academician Zhong Huilan, the founder of tropical medicine in China and former president of Beijing Central People’s Hospital. All department staff have consistently upheld the fine traditions of rigorous scholarship and courageous innovation, and remain committed to giving equal emphasis to medical care, education, and research. After 70 years of arduous effort, the Department of Pathology has made substantial progress, with continuous improvement and refinement in discipline development.

The Department of Pathology undertakes the pathological diagnosis of clinically submitted tissue and cytology specimens and autopsies for our hospital. Since its establishment, it has completed more than 1 million pathological diagnoses, and its level of pathological diagnosis has received widespread recognition and acclaim from pathology colleagues nationwide. At present, our department is a 985 national key discipline, a major participating institution of the Pathology Center of Peking University Health Science Center, a residency training base in pathology in Beijing, a specialized training base of Peking University, and a doctoral degree-granting institution. It currently has 45 employees, including 26 physicians (9 with associate senior professional titles or above) and 19 technical staff members. It has established 10 pathological subspecialties, including female reproductive pathology, bone and soft tissue pathology, urinary and male reproductive pathology, breast pathology, lymphoid and hematopoietic pathology, digestive pathology, and molecular pathology. In recent years, it has completed more than 100,000 cases annually of surgical resection, needle biopsy, and difficult pathological diagnoses referred from other hospitals; more than 8000 intraoperative frozen-section examinations; nearly 5000 cytology cases; and more than 5000 molecular pathology tests.

Our department provides pathological consultations for difficult and rare diseases referred from all over the country, completing more than 5000 cases annually. In addition to routine technical work, the department also performs modern molecular biology techniques, including in situ hybridization, PCR, first-generation sequencing, and second-generation sequencing. At present, the Department of Pathology is a core unit of the hospital’s Molecular Diagnostics Center, and all its work provides strong support for guiding individualized clinical treatment and the translational application of clinical research.