Pathological quality assurance in gastro-intestinal cancer

Quality assurance has become an integrated and important part of surgical pathology. Not only laboratory quality systems and quality control of pathology reporting have been introduced, also interdisciplinary quality systems are being developed. This review focuses on the different aspects of quality assurance that can nowadays be used in the daily practice of pathology management of gastrointestinal cancers, especially, gastric- and colorectal cancer. Own data are, especially, derived from the recently conducted clinical trial on pre-operative radiotherapy for rectal cancer and emphasize the importance of multidisciplinary approaches.