Researchers from University Hospital Zurich report their 10-year follow-up study on diagnostic errors in Modern Pathology. The researchers previously examined diagnostic errors between 1972 and 1992, and for this study, they looked at differences between clinical diagnoses and those made at autopsy for 100 patients who died at a teaching hospital in Switzerland in 2002. They found that during the last 30 years, major diagnostic errors declined from 30 percent to 7 percent while sensitivity for diagnosing cardiovascular, infectious, and neoplastic diseases increased, and specificity for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases increased. Additionally, the researchers note that the number of diagnostic procedures performed have increased over the years. "The frequency of major diagnostic errors has been further reduced at the beginning of the new millennium probably due in large part to new diagnostic tools," they write.

Thomas Wiesner from the Medical University of Graz in Austria and his colleagues report evidence in Modern Pathology for a morphological variant of superficial spreading melanoma, which they call 'melanomas composed exclusively or predominantly of large nests,' or MLNs. The researchers histologically and genetically characterized 11 MLNs, finding that they have a "predominant arrangement of melanocytes in very large nests" that conventional superficial spreading melanoma lacks, and that "all of the tumors in this study showed multiple gains and losses of several chromosomes," similar to conventional superficial spreading melanoma.