Current concepts in the surgical pathology of pulmonary infections.

Among patients with pulmonary infections, those who are immunosuppressed and have pulmonary infiltrates continue to be the most numerous coming to biopsy and present the greatest diagnostic challenge to the surgical pathologist. These are the cases in which immunodiagnostic methods and DNA probes are immediately beneficial. Enthusiasm for application of these new methods for the recognition of infectious agents must be tempered by careful clinicopathologic correlation, since more sensitive methods are likely to pick up more bystander organisms and polymicrobial processes. Nevertheless, the development of organism-specific visualization reagents remains one of the most exciting areas in pathology.