March 19, 2026
When you have a biopsy or surgery, the tissue or fluid removed is sent to a pathology laboratory for examination. The type of procedure used to collect your sample shapes what your pathology report contains and what the findings mean. These procedure guides are designed to help you understand your report from beginning to end, starting with what happened during the procedure and ending with what the results mean for your care.
If you are looking for a plain-language explanation of a specific diagnosis rather than the procedure itself, visit our Diagnosis Guides. If you are looking for a definition of a single medical term, visit our Pathology Dictionary.
What is a Procedure Guide?
A procedure guide explains what a specific medical procedure involves, how the pathology laboratory processes the specimen, and what all the findings in your report mean. These guides are written for patients who have already had a procedure and received a report, and want to understand it more fully before or after speaking with their doctor.
Procedure guides are different from Diagnosis Guides. A Diagnosis Guide focuses on a single specific diagnosis — for example, invasive ductal carcinoma of the breast. A Procedure Guide covers the full range of findings that may appear in a report from a particular type of procedure, since the same procedure can yield many different results depending on what the pathologist finds.
Browse by Body System
Urinary System
Understanding your TURBT pathology report
A guide to the pathology report produced after transurethral resection of a bladder tumour.
You may find this helpful if your doctor removed a growth from your bladder and your report describes a urothelial carcinoma, papillary tumour, carcinoma in situ, or tumour grade and stage.
Understanding your radical cystectomy pathology report
A guide to the pathology report produced after surgical removal of the bladder.
You may find this helpful if you had your bladder removed for bladder cancer and your report describes a tumour stage, surgical margins, lymph node findings, or response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
Male Reproductive System
Understanding your radical prostatectomy pathology report
A guide to the pathology report produced after surgical removal of the prostate gland.
You may find this helpful if you had surgery for prostate cancer and your report describes a Gleason grade, Grade Group, surgical margins, extraprostatic extension, or pathological stage.
Breast
Understanding your breast biopsy report
A guide to the pathology report produced after a breast core needle biopsy, vacuum-assisted biopsy, or surgical excision.
You may find this helpful if you had a breast biopsy and your report describes a benign finding, a high-risk lesion such as atypical ductal hyperplasia, DCIS, or an invasive breast cancer with grade, hormone receptor, and HER2 results.
Kidney
Understanding your kidney transplant biopsy report
A guide to the pathology report produced after a biopsy of a transplanted kidney.
You may find this helpful if you have received a kidney transplant and your doctor performed a biopsy to investigate a change in kidney function, check for rejection, or monitor for infection.
Blood and Bone Marrow
Understanding your bone marrow biopsy report
A guide to the pathology report produced after a bone marrow aspirate and core biopsy.
You may find this helpful if your doctor performed a bone marrow biopsy to investigate abnormal blood counts, a suspected blood cancer such as leukemia, lymphoma, or myeloma, or to check whether a known cancer has spread to the bone marrow.
Digestive System
Understanding your colonoscopy biopsy report
A guide to the pathology report produced after biopsy or polypectomy during colonoscopy.
You may find this helpful if your doctor removed a polyp or took a tissue sample during a colonoscopy and your report describes a polyp type, dysplasia, carcinoma, or inflammatory findings.
Lymph Nodes
Understanding your sentinel lymph node biopsy report
A guide to the pathology report produced after a sentinel lymph node biopsy, most commonly performed for breast cancer and melanoma.
You may find this helpful if a sentinel lymph node was removed during surgery for breast cancer, melanoma, or another cancer, and your report describes whether cancer was found and how large the deposit was.
Don’t see your procedure listed?
New procedure guides are added regularly. In the meantime, our Pathology Dictionary defines the terms most commonly found in pathology reports, and Osler, our pathology chatbot, can help explain specific findings from your report in plain language.
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