advancing practice, instruction and innovation through informatics

University of California at San Francisco
Division of Dermatopathology
San Francisco, California
Shawn E. Cowper, MD

The World Wide Web (WWW) is one of the best places to seek and find medical information. The Web combines ease of use and availability with a capacity for regular updates that cannot be matched by medical publications. Unfortunately, however, anybody can place material on the WWW. The result is a vast sea of opinion, fallacy, and outright fiction with small uncharted islands of medical wisdom sprinkled about. A savvy Internet user develops personal strategies to navigate the straits, but novice or infrequent WWW users may founder in the nonsense before they reach the information paradise they have heard so much about.

PathMax is the pathologist's answer to useless cyberdrifting. PathMax reduces the field of pathology to 20 categories, each of which can be searched for links, journals, organizations, books, and services pertinent to that subdivision. Also available is a handy interface to Internet literature searches, a virtual reference area, and a direct link to a text based pathology search engine (pathsearch.com).

PathMax is a cooperative project of professionals in the field of pathology who volunteer to canvas the WWW for high-quality, up-to-date, education-related websites. It was developed as a private project, and is unassociated with an academic department of pathology. Instead, PathMax invites interested pathology-trained individuals from around the world to participate with and critique the site.