From 28 to 30 May, the 109th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Pathology (DGP) took place at the Kongress am Park in Augsburg. On the first day of the conference, the seminar room where our NATON network meeting and second quarterly meeting of 2026 took place was completely full with 50 participants. A further 25 colleagues joined the meeting virtually.
NATON coordinator Tina Schaller from University Hospital Augsburg opened the quarterly meeting with a research presentation on the topic “Autopsy and myocarditis – cardiac immune cell infiltration”. Robin Mayer (University Hospital Frankfurt) followed by presenting the initial results of a survey on the use of digital pathology. The rest of the network meeting was filled with information and lively discussion regarding the SVIK motion.
Numerous other NATON contributions rounded off the program of the DGP Annual Meeting, such as a panel discussion on the topic “Autopsy Quo Vadis” with Benjamin Ondruschka (UKE Hamburg), as well as presentations on the development of a national infrastructure for pathology (Peter Boor, University Hospital Aachen), and on autopsies of highly infectious deceased persons (Kristina Allgoewer, UKE Hamburg). A particular highlight was the presentation by Ludwig Bosse (Hamburg University of Technology), who used virtual reality to remotely control, from the stage in Augsburg, a robotic, minimally invasive tissue sample collection procedure taking place live at the UKE’s Institute of Forensic Medicine, 750 km away.