Dr. Gordon Love Publishes Fungal Pathology: A Diagnostic Atlas
Dr. Gordon Love, Chair of the Department of Pathology, recently published the newly
released Fungal Pathology: A Diagnostic Atlas, together with authors Drs. Mary K. Klassen-Fischer, Ronald C. Neafie, and Randall
T. Hayden.
Dr. Love said that his friend and co-author, Randall Hayden, MD, brought the authors together about four years ago to update the outdated atlas, The Pathologic Diagnosis of Fungal Infections, published in 1987 by the American Society of Clinical Pathology. The teams began by using the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) slide files.
Each author provided a unique perspective to the effort. Dr. Hayden is a microbiology pathologist at St. Jude Medical Center in Memphis, Tennessee. Mary Klassen-Fischer, MD was a specialist in infectious disease pathology at the AFIP prior to its closure in 2011. In addition to providing her collection of fungal photographs and materials, Dr. Klassen-Fischer and her colleague, Ronald Neafie, had access to the exceptional consultation material in the warehoused AFIP files which are otherwise not readily available for study.
“As a pathologist who is board certified in medical microbiology and mycology, I made sure that our discussions reflected the many fungal reclassifications made over the past decade and I contributed many additional photographs to provide a balanced mycology presentation,” Dr. Love said.
Dr. Love described their work as an “evolution” that ultimately became the new textbook,
filled with photographs and discussion. (photo, left: a photograph from chapter 10, Lobomycosis. The disease is lobomycosis,
a rare mycosis generally restricted to South and Central America.)
“I believe that the many photographs of rare mycology pathogens will set new standards for fungal diagnosis as much of this material is unavailable from other sources or is extremely dated using obsolete classifications,” he said.
According to the ASCP website, since the publication of Pathologic Diagnosis of Fungal Infections by ASCP Press over a quarter century ago, the field of medical mycology has undergone numerous changes in taxonomy, with many pathogens redefined, reclassified, or initially described. This textbook combines the changes in diagnostic methods in the last 25 years all in one easy-to-navigate book.
This comprehensive atlas includes not only prototypical examples of each pathogen, but also:
- Demonstrations across the range of morphologies typically encountered in patient samples.
- A vast collection of material from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology repository dating back over a century and including tens of millions of slides, blocks and preserved wet tissue specimens, serving as an unparalleled resource for creating an unabridged view of human pathology.
- Textual introductory segments for each pathogen include information on taxonomy, epidemiology, clinical disease correlates, treatment, morphology, culture characteristics, susceptibility testing, and molecular detection and characterization.