Overview
Dr. Becich is Director of the Division of Pathology Informatics which is responsible for the management and upgrading of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's (UPMC) laboratory informatics services, including the clinical pathology system (SunQuest) and the anatomic pathology system (CoMed). These two systems are an integral part to the patient's decision management, and the data from CoPath and SunQuest represent over half of the data in the UPMC's electronic medical record (MARS or Medical Archival System). The Division is also responsible for computer support to the Division of Cellular and Molecular Pathology and the Administrative Division at the University of Pittsburgh.

The focus of the division is training residents, fellows and other informatics-related personnel as well as developmental research programs in pathology informatics. Current projects in the department include integration of an image-capable workstation into the pathologist's desktop, formation of a centralized image-capable computerized patient medical record, telepathology and implementation of other new technologies, which include bar coding, robotics, voice recognition, synoptic reporting, extensions to clinical LIS database architecture, development of interfaces to regulatory agencies and autodelivery of reports to community pathologists as part of the Reference Laboratory Alliance (RLA) initiative. The division is also developing access to continuing medical education (CME) case studies on the World Wide Web and the creation of a totally electronic (WWW-based) Uropathology journal.

The Informatics team has developed an image database with the Information Services Division at UPMC and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center utilizing VISTA workstations running on a PC-LAN. The VISTA workstations are an Information Services Division integrated workstation using 10 megabit/sec ethernet network interface cards (NIC's) to provide access via our 100 megabit/sec FDDI (fiber distributed data interface) to our electronic medical records system (MARS - Medical Archival System), our Laboratory Information System (LIS) and our Image Database. We have deployed 15 image capture and 24 image display stations with customized software developed in-house. Our images are archived on a RAID 5 storage system and currently houses over 10,000 images. With our image database, we have successfully deployed strategies to replace photographic images of patient's clinical specimens, hard copies of hand-written requisitions and a variety of cost intensive medical images (e.g., transmission electron micrographs, fluorescence images, etc.). Our system is currently being interfaced to the electronic medical records system which will "image enable" UPMC. Current development projects include CME creditable educational content via the WWW, telereporting to consulting institutions via the Internet and an HTML-based telepathology system. In collaboration with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, we are also exploring image processing and object-oriented database methods which will be used to query the image archive.

The Division holds the Anatomic Pathology Noon Conference twice a year. The Division holds an Imaging Team meeting every Friday at 11am in the 9th floor conference room of Presbyterian University Hospital to discuss current imaging projects, exchange ideas, discuss problems encountered and brainstorm for solutions. Schedules are made prioritizing the installation of hardware and software workstations, and there is a general discussion concerning what's new in the high tech market. The Clinical Pathology staff meets every Wednesday to discuss project schedules and implementation progress.

Dr. Becich is also a genitourinary pathologist with a Ph.D. in experimental pathology. His basic interests are in the cell biology of polarized prostate epithelial cells and he is particularly interested in the role of receptor mediated trafficking via endocytic vesicles and in their role in growth control. He has developed elegant systems isolating cellular compartments that will augment our ability to understand the growth biology of prostate epithelium in vivo and in vitro. As director of Genitourinary Pathology, Diagnostic and Research Electron Microscopy as well as Pathology Informatics he is uniquely situated to support the prostate database functions in the accrual of patient information that will be important to the studies of genitourinary diseases. Working with Drs. Robert Bahnson and Donald Trump, he has developed a multi-hospital referral system for channeling patients in need of nerve sparing radical prostatectomies to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center . Dr. Becich is also responsible for all of the diagnostic evaluation of prostate material in our hospital system. With his genitourinary fellowship program he has developed and implemented a whole mount procedure described in this application. Dr. Becich will coordinate the acquisition of prostate specimens, developing normal, tumor, and preneoplastic areas with the whole mount procedure and select tissue for in vivo and in vitro analysis. Trained in experimental pathology, Dr. Becich has dedicated his career to studying cancer biology in normal and neoplastic cells. Initially, he studied pancreatic cancer and subsequently, hepatic and intestinal cancer cell models. Since arriving at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Dr. Becich has helped to build a prostate cancer biology program which, after three years of efforts, is now a mature banking operation containing approximately 100 prostate adenocarcinomas and normal controls. This bank of samples has provided a rich resource for the University environment and is now being expanded so that the tissues can also be provided to other national research organizations. His role as a surgical pathology specialist in genitourinary surgical pathology have provided the framework for establishing a nationally recognized genitourinary fellowship program. He is currently developing a similar program in pathology informatics. Dr. Becich's research interests are developed both in the clinical and basic sciences and are described below: