“When my co-editor Dr. Kong and I were planning the book, we thought about the textbooks that we go back to again and again and that we find to be a pleasure to work with.” – Kristen Atkins, MD
We’re doing a lot more imaging now and getting lesions earlier. I think we’re going to see an explosion in the significance in those smaller, pre-cursor lesions. I also find that we get consulted more on the significance of some of the things that we diagnose and how they need to be managed. Pathologists are having a greater role in the interdisciplinary conferences than in the past.
Practical Breast Pathology is part of the Pattern Recognition Series. For the book, we took breast pathology, which is amenable to a patterns idea, and tried to break different lesions down into stromal, ductal or mixed type patterns, and create an algorithm for working out the benign and malignant lesions within each of the patterns. We were fortunate to recruit quite a few really good writers and educators to participate in the book and we’re very excited about it.
When my co-editor, Dr. Christina Kong, and I were planning the book, we thought about the textbooks that we go back to again and again that we find to be a pleasure to work with. We tried to emulate some of those key factors such as bridging topics with differentials, rather than having to look everything up by topic, and having a lot of cross-talk between the different lesions.
I think there are several good textbooks out on breast pathology, but what I think is unique about Practical Breast Pathology is that it is written from a teaching perspective rather than being just a laundry list of all of the lesions that could happen in the breast. It is useful for both the resident as well as someone in community practice, as we’re seeing more breast centers evolve and more breast biopsies taken. The book fills a niche in helping people figure out what they should be thinking about when they see something a little bit different.
Kristen A. Atkins, MD serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Virginia Medical Center. Her clinical specialties include surgical and cytopathology with a special interest in gynecologic and breast pathology. She is an editor of Practical Breast Pathology: A Diagnostic Approach.
Dr. Atkins holds her medical degree from the University of Vermont Burlington and completed her residency at Stanford University. She also completed a Surgical Pathology Fellowship at Stanford University and a fellowship in Cytopathology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Atkins is board-certified in Anatomic Pathology and Cytopathology.
Related Authors: Christina Kong, MD
