PathTutor
Graduate project as part of the Multidisciplinary Design Program, Michigan Engineering. Partnered with faculty and clinicians from the University of Michigan and UCLA Health.
Concept Designs
This started as a request to build a mobile app for reading pathology slides. I pushed back. Pathologists don't read slides on their phones, and tools for that already exist. So we went back to research instead, and found something more useful: pathology training depends on human-led case reasoning, and students were struggling with it, stressed and underprepared even when they had no plans to specialize in the field. What helped most, they said, was shadowing real pathologists.
That became the model for PathTutor: an AI tutor that walks students through real cases the way a pathologist would, asking questions instead of giving answers, with summaries built in so students could review their reasoning after each session.
I led design and research on a three-person team, alongside a PM/developer and a junior designer-researcher. In December 2025, we shipped a static HTML concept to a pathology conference, building within an existing design system to hit the deadline. That was fine for what it was. But this June, I wanted to see what it could actually be. New design system, coded from scratch with AI tools, 0 to 1. What you see here is that version. Ongoing volunteer work.
Features
01.
Real case structure
Each case opens with the patient's history, then moves to the slide, then asks the student to reason toward a diagnosis, the same sequence a pathologist actually works through. Built directly from what students said helped most: shadowing someone live.
02.
AI interactive probing
The AI's job is to probe, not explain. It asks follow-up questions, offers a hint only when a student is stuck, and waits rather than correcting too early. Harder to design than an AI that gives answers, but it's the only version that actually teaches.
03.
Learning summaries and notes
Each session leaves behind a summary the student can revisit, during or after. Pathology isn't a one-pass subject, being able to come back and review your own reasoning matters as much as the case itself.
