[What is new in 2010 for electron microscopy in surgical pathology?]

In the last decades, several ancillary methods, such as immunohistochemistry and molecular biology techniques, have increased the possibilities for the diagnosis and to evaluate the prognosis of lesions observed in a laboratory of pathology. Conversely, the impact of another method largely used a couple of years ago in a laboratory of pathology, the electron microscopy (EM), is currently limited. EM is a difficult, quite expensive and long method, which requires technicians with a high qualification. Therefore, EM is currently rarely available at the hospital in a laboratory of pathology and is essentially established in research centers. However, EM is still an essential tool for the surgical pathologist. This method allows in some circumstances to confirm or, more rarely, to make the diagnosis of a couple of tissular and cellular lesions observed in human pathology. EM is also an interesting method to better understand the etiopathogenesis of emerging human diseases, in particular of emerging infectious diseases. In this review, we report the main indication of EM in human pathology, we lay special emphasize in certain infectious diseases and neoplasia.