Introduction
Since the development of modern anatomical pathology as a medical discipline in the 19 Century it has been uniquely bound to the location of the specimen, requiring direct (microscopic) inspection of the biopsy.
Today Digital Pathology is breaking those bonds, allowing the practice of anatomical pathology anywhere, independent from the physical location of the biopsy and thus the patient. Remarkably enough, the coming of age of high speed and high quality digital microscope slide scanners coincides with the success of globe spanning digital sharing and collaboration networks: the collaborative encyclopedia WikiPedia, GitHub for collaborative software development, Office 365 for business office software. Digital Pathology is enabled by these technology revolutions to convert local pathology labs into globe-spanning virtual pathology networks. In this white paper I will share with you Philips’ vision on the future of collaborative digital pathology, and explain why it needs an open platform approach to succeed.
Digital Pathology needs to bring mobility and flexibility to the pathologist, so that he or she can work from anywhere, and present, share and participate fully in multidisciplinary team meetings, tumor-boards, and conferences. All without any concessions to patient safety and privacy. A fatal -- though perhaps understandable -- mistake would be to address this by simply replacing the current anatomical pathology’s practice of moving physical tissue blocks and slides from A to B by a practice of moving digital image files of microscopy slides from A to B. There are three reasons why enabling collaboration in digital pathology by sharing whole slide image files will not be productive:
- Security, privacy and patient consent are impossible to guarantee when patient records, such as whole slide images, are exchanged as files via network shares or portable media.
- Mobile workers require data that can be accessed from anywhere. The mobile software paradigm does not, and will never, support local storage of large data sets such as medical images.
- The sheer sizes of digital whole slide images prevents effectively storing, sharing and analyzing on anything but server grade hardware that does typically not allow file based interactions.
>> Download the full Application Note as PDF
Newsletters
Receive the latest pathology news, personalities, education, and career development – weekly to your inbox.
