- Optical Microscopy
- Procedures for acceptance of the biopsy, and macroscopic examination of the surgical samples, with particular attention reserved to the extemporaneous examination
- General principles of the main techniques of fixation, of tissue processing, of the embedding procedures, and sectioning of the paraffin-embedded blocks
- Sectioning and staining protocols
- Staining methods: particular attention will be reserved to the hematoxylin and eosin and some of the frequently used histomorphological, histochemical and special staining techniques
- Tissue processing: pitfalls and technical artifacts
- Principles of the immunohistochemical staining
- How to set up a histological sample for the immunohistochemical staining
- Types of antibodies and methods for the production of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies
- Physico-chemical properties of the antigen-antibody binding: causes of the antigen unbinding and methods to optimize the use of the immunoreagents
- Antigen identification through immunodetection systems
- Antigen retrieval methods: procedures using heat and protein digestion
- Principal immunohistochemical staining methods
- Multiplexing
- Pitfalls and technical artifacts in immunohistochemistry
- Application of immunohistochemistry in human pathology
- Tissue Microarray (TMA) sample preparation
- Methods for automatic sample preparation and analysis
- Diagnostic roles of the molecular biology techniques (i.e., FISH, CISH, DNAscope, and RNAscope methods) in human pathology