Proper assessment of tumor size, lesion distribution, and disease extent is essential for adequate morphologic characterization of breast carcinoma. These parameters are of prognostic significance and are also important for therapeutic decision making, not only in advanced cases, but also in tumors at early stage of their natural history as a considerable proportion of these cases are multifocal or diffused and extensive. Modern imaging methods (modern ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging) detect multiple foci with high-accuracy challenging breast pathologists to apply diagnostic methods matching the sensitivity of the improved imaging. On the other hand, identification of small additional tumor foci is difficult because they are often hardly visible on macroscopic examination of the tissue and are regularly missed during the traditional histological workup characterized by fragmenting the specimen into 1-2 cm tissue blocks and sampling the visible tumor(s). This is especially true if such sampling is carried out without radiological guidance. Embedding 3-4 mm thick slices of the specimen into large paraffin blocks without fragmentation allows visualization of cross-sections of the entire specimen with most of these tumor foci included and with their interrelation preserved for proper assessment of the above-mentioned parameters. In addition, the method allows adequate characterization of the in situ component of the tumors, which also carries prognostic information. Despite these facts, large-format histology is used routinely for diagnosing breast carcinoma in only a few laboratories around the world.

We invite authors with experience in using large-format histology to submit review articles or original research articles to this special issue to illustrate the advantages of the method for the wide professional community and to stimulate practicing pathologist to explore these advantages in their everyday clinical practice. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Accurate assessment of subgross histological prognostic parameters
• The impact of using large-format histology on management of the patients with special focus on individual tailored surgery
• Radiological-pathological correlation in assessing the subgross prognostic parameters, especially regarding magnetic resonance imaging and other modern imaging methods
• Multifocality in breast carcinoma and its clinical significance
• Three-dimensional reconstruction of breast lesions
• Large-format histology in diagnosing cancers of other organs
• Methodological issues
• Cost-benefit analysis of using large-format histology

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijbc/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ijbc/dbc/ according to the following timetable: