Digital Pathology Blog

According to the College of American Pathologists (CAP) 2013 data, approximately 80 percent of the world’s pathologists are based in the United States. This concentration causes an increased need to access, share, and diagnose images remotely.

In nearly every conversation we have with major hospital centers and pathology labs, the question comes up about how to initiate 2^nd opinion pathology referrals from outside the US. Everybody wants to know: how can we work with China…or India…or other areas of the world where pathology is dramatically underserved? Most US expert centers have a healthy referral business, with slides arriving via mail and FedEx daily/weekly. Going digital in pathology would provide the means to increase referral business by streamlining and accelerating the process, from image acquisition to diagnostic report. 

Bella Lugosi is famously quoted as saying, “I vant to suck your blood.” Maybe he was ahead of his time along with the Twilight crew. Three new papers published a few weeks ago in Nature Medicine and Science show exciting implications on reversing aging in studies of blood exchanges between young and old mice. The studies found that infusing the blood of younger mice into older mice rejuvenated their muscles and brains. The opposite appears to hold true too – infusing blood from older mice into younger mice accelerated the aging process. 

The Affordable Care Act and market changes like baby boomers entering their senior years with a decreasing amount of doctors to care for them are driving a mind-blowing rate of change in healthcare. Medical practices, including pathology, will sink or swim based on how they adapt to the new realities.

There are a lot of stories being written about the human papilloma virus (HPV) test that has been approved by the FDA as a primary screening tool for cervical cancer. We decided to check in with one of the leading cytopathologists in the U.S., Dr. David Wilbur, Director of Pathology Imaging (and former Director of Cytopathology), at Massachusetts General Hospital to get his perspective.

It’s interesting to look beyond the U.S. to see how global digital pathology adoption is progressing. After a three month test pilot last year (with more testing over the next ten months), University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust has launched a digital pathology system across its facility with the Omnyx Integrated Digital pathology system from GE Healthcare.

Pathologists, particularly forensic pathologists and medical examiners, seem to provoke endless curiosity from Hollywood television writers. The pathology fascination can be seen in shows throughout the years like Quincy ME, Body of Proof, Rizzoli and Isles, and the CSI shows:

The question sounds cliché. Loosely defined, “team” is a group of people who work together, generally toward shared outcomes or goals. Like many, I grew up playing sports during childhood, we rode bikes without helmets, fended for ourselves, got ourselves to little league games and found out when we got into trouble our parents were generally on the side of the school or the coach. Those days are sadly over but the experiences taught me a couple of key life lessons:

When you boil it down to the bones, digital pathology needs to do one thing: make life easier for pathologists. Their role involves supporting physicians and patients across many institutions, geographies and hardware. They need to integrate all they do with their LISs. The end result has to be a better, faster, smarter, and easier to use workflow environment.

Major changes rarely evolve in a linear fashion. It usually comes down to a group of people pushing forward a new model while another group holds on with both hands to the status quo. Then a small group in the middle plays its role as the bridge to both sides.