About

Instruments and teaching for the diagnostic bench.

MEDSMITH is a small medical research and development company in Bydgoszcz, Poland. It was founded in 2021 by a practising pathologist to develop instruments for biopsy and cytology — and, since then, to teach the diagnostic craft those instruments serve.

Pathologist in a white coat examining a slide at a microscope — **Fig. 07** — The diagnostic bench: where the company's instruments and courses both begin.

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What we do

Our work sits between pathology, biomedical engineering and oncological diagnostics. We design and protect medical devices that make sampling and smear preparation more reliable, publish on tumour diagnostics, and produce recorded courses and written casebooks for pathologists in training and the laboratories that support them.

We are deliberately small. Development is done with the clinicians who will use the instrument; the courses are written by the people who sign reports. MEDSMITH is a registered European Union trade mark.

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Instruments

BiopsyA medical biopsy needle guide — inventors Adam Kowalewski and Łukasz Szylberg — protected at the Polish Patent Office, with MEDSMITH as rights holder. It addresses targeting and repeatability of core sampling, the step where most avoidable diagnostic loss happens.
CytologyA device for preparing cytological smears — inventor Adam Kowalewski — protected at the Polish Patent Office. Uniform spreading and fixation is the difference between an adequate and an inadequate smear; the device standardises both.

Both instruments appear in the courses as worked examples of pre-analytical quality, and the courses are the reason the instruments exist.

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Education

Seven recorded or written modules cover the diagnostic path from digital slide to integrated molecular report. They are self-paced, delivered by email within 24 hours of purchase, and can be taken alone or as one curriculum. There are no live sessions — questions go by email and are answered by the author.

See the contents

Microscope objective above a stained glass slide — **Fig. 08** — Objective over the section.

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Founder

Adam Kowalewski, MD, PhD — doctor of medical sciences, pathomorphology specialist in oncological diagnostics at the Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz.

He holds a European MSc in Molecular Pathology and completed research fellowships at Institut Curie in Paris and Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. His publications concern ovarian, renal and breast cancer diagnostics, cytopathology and the role of biopsy in tumour diagnosis, including recent work on personalised diagnostics in ovarian cancer. He is the author and presenter of the MEDSMITH curriculum and the inventor behind the company's instruments.

Company identification and legal details are set out in the Terms & Conditions.

§5

Research focus

Three questions run through the company's publications, instruments and courses alike.

SamplingHow much of a diagnosis is decided before the slide exists — needle path, adequacy, fixation — and how to make that step repeatable.
OvaryHistotype-first diagnosis of ovarian carcinoma and the immunohistochemical and molecular markers that now change first-line treatment.
ReportingHow pathologists phrase certainty and doubt, and what tumour boards actually do with each wording.

Two scientists reviewing a slide together at the microscope — **Fig. 09** — Second reads. Every casebook answer was reviewed by a second pathologist before publication.

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How a module is made

Months 1–2Case selection from routine sign-out
Cases are drawn from anonymised routine material, not from consultation rarities, so the distribution of what you see matches what you will report.
Month 3Scanning and annotation
Slides are scanned at 40×, colour-checked and annotated in the same viewer used in the lessons. Regions that mislead are annotated as carefully as the diagnostic ones.
Months 4–5Script, second read, recording
Every lesson is scripted, read by a second pathologist for accuracy of terminology against the current WHO edition, then recorded live over the viewer.
Month 6Assessment and release
Assessment fields are chosen from cases not shown in the lesson. The module is released to the revision log and to everyone with active access.

§7

Editorial standards

Current editions only

Lessons cite the WHO Classification 5th edition, ICCR datasets and the reporting systems in force. A lesson that falls behind is re-recorded, not footnoted.

Anonymised material

All clinical context is anonymised and altered in non-diagnostic details. No patient-identifying information is present in any slide, image or report.

Disclosure

The company holds patent rights for two instruments shown in Modules 03 and 04. Neither module requires them, and the lessons say so.

Corrections

Errors reported by readers are corrected in the next revision and credited in the revision log. Nothing is silently changed.

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Bydgoszcz

Laboratory bench with a microscope, rotator and sample tubes — **Fig. 10** — The bench where the smear device was first tested.

The company works from Bydgoszcz, a city of 340 000 in northern Poland with a regional oncology centre and a medical faculty.

The Oncology Centre is one of the country's larger tumour diagnostic services, and the founder's daily sign-out there is where the casebook's material and the courses' priorities come from. The courses are in English because the residents and laboratories who asked for them are spread across Europe; correspondence is answered in English or Polish.

Company identification and legal details are set out in the Terms & Conditions.