Digital Pathology Blog

Whole slide scanning of pathology slides is becoming more affordable and convenient for building the foundation of a laboratory’s digital pathology service.  

Once you’ve obtained a whole slide scanner and your laboratory has developed an effective workflow for scanning images of pathology slides from your cases, you can store your whole slide images (WSI) on a server making them easily accessible from your laptop or tablet. As your image repository grows, however, finding the images you need becomes a challenge.

Most WSI directories are based on laboratory accession numbers.  When needing to access images to demonstrate certain features, whether for research, teaching, publication, creating digital study sets or other applications, you must first determine which cases will potentially have the images that best demonstrate what you want to show.

At Pathology Visions 2015 Corista hosted a reception featuring guest speaker, Dr. Arief Suriawinata, Chief of Anatomic Pathology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH. Dr. Suriawinata spoke on “The Dartmouth Experience: Whole Slide Imaging, Workflow and Quality Assurance”.

Dr. Suriawinata noted that while whole slide imaging is here to stay, its implementation is not without challenges in terms of integration, workflow, support, data storage and, last but not least, pathologists’ comfort. He emphasized that the key to successful implementation is a well-designed workflow providing whole slide images (WSI) of excellent quality to pathologists and residents where and when they need them.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s experience using WSI for its quality assurance program and how the program prepares pathologists for the utilization of telepathology generated a lively discussion on today’s key issues in digital pathology.

Cut Waste and Increase Quality of Care with New Technology

I’m sure you’ve thought about it. Every time a package arrives at your pathology practice, it represents a patient anxiously waiting for results at the other end. 

What would happen if you could significantly reduce the time it takes to return an opinion? How would your practice benefit if you could reduce the costs involved? 

Tumor boards were created with worthy objectives in mind – to share knowledge, improve current patient care, and prepare/educate residents & fellows for their future practices. Tumor boards are also a requirement for cancer center accreditation, hence a necessary cost of doing business.

Preparing for tumor boards, however, is too often an onerous task fraught with time delays, rework, and cumbersome, inflexible presentation methods. After your support staff pulls reports, retrieves slides, and brings them to you, do you spend hours photographing and taking notes of the key points you then load into a PowerPoint to present for each case? Do you ever get to your tumor boards and find that another view of the slide might better answer the clinician’s question? 

When reviewing previous slides for your patient’s current case or when preparing for tumor boards, are you spending precious time and resources having your staff retrieve or recut slides? Do slides get lost or damaged causing more delays in your ability to expedite your case? Management of slide and block archives is a challenge for all anatomic pathology laboratories. How can implementing a robust digital pathology program help you make the best use of your time and resources? 

In a previous blog post, we shared key steps to a successful digital pathology system implementation. This is the second article of a two-part series designed to assist you in managing the whole process.

A successful digital pathology system implementation depends upon careful planning and commitment. Most pathologists are hesitant to move from the gold standard of glass slides to a digital image-based platform. Today, however, whole-slide scanners can provide high quality images that allow pathologists increased flexibility for case management and collaboration with other pathologists. As the technology continues to grow, digital pathology will soon become the new gold standard.