Keeping our patients healthy to keep going

Submitted by:	Patricia Hernandez Rivera
Department:	School of Dentistry
Faculty:	Medicine & Dentistry

Oral Medicine specialists diagnose and manage diseases affecting the oral and maxillofacial region. Clinical diagnosis requires knowledge, clinical expertise and the capacity to build mental pathways to discover the definitive diagnosis. It must be as accurate as possible, differentiating malignant and premalignant from benign conditions. This complex process is fundamental to giving a disease a name, and in this way, the clinician can establish the proper management. In the mouth, different pathologies have similar clinical features, which must be corroborated by microscopic examination. My research evaluates the accuracy of clinical and histopathological diagnoses. Understanding which pathologies are more frequently diagnosed incorrectly will provide important information to improve practitioners’ diagnosis skills. On the left of the image is a clinical photo of a lesion on the cheek that can be ignored. The expertise raised the flag of a condition that required a biopsy. Finally, the microscopic examination showed a malignancy, which dictates a different treatment. Ultimately, a correct diagnosis allows positive outcomes and positive results mean happy, healthy people enjoy life.

Was your image created using Generative AI?
No.

How was your image created?
Two clinical photos and one histopathological photo were edited with Photoshop and then integrated using PowerPoint.