Digital pathology drivers#

Sharing cases: Digitized scans can be easily shared for second opinions, interdisciplinary tumor conferences and educating students and residents. Depending on the laboratory setup, scanned cases can also improve workflow by reducing physical slide distribution. The retrieval of archived slides can also be considerably simplified and does not require staff assistance.

Digital pathology drivers#

Access to slides: One of the most obvious drivers of digital pathology in the past 2 years has been pandemic-related to enable remote work. Most viewer programs also have annotation functions, which enable the documentation of exact measurements (for instance, the exact infiltration depth of a tumor or distance to resection margins). Patient safety-related: Provided storage is reliable and data secure, a scanned slide cannot be lost or broken. There are various potential advantages of digital pathology, including: Advantages and challenges of digital pathology

The most complex application is the digitization and storage of whole slides images (WSI), either for use in diagnostic routine or for educational or research purposes. Real-time sharing of pathology images with a common viewer (telepathology) has been favored for some time by hospital systems with multiple sites and increasingly implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic ( 6).

For instance, digital photography to capture and store macroscopic images can be considered one of the first widespread aspects of digital pathology. What constitutes digital pathology? Broadly interpreted, this can entail any sort of work involving a digital image. Select review articles, white papers and consensus guidelines are recommended for further in-depth reading ( 1– 5). The objective of this article is to provide a broad overview of digital pathology for the general pathologist and address real-world issues which may be underrepresented in the literature. Careful planning and certain practical considerations can be paramount for a smooth transition to an efficient digital workflow. As technical aspects and possibilities advance at nearly dizzying speed, it must be emphasized that a digital approach will affect many fundamental aspects of daily routine in a pathology lab. However, many pathology institutes that pursue the path to digital pathology realize that this is not always as straightforward as it seems. In many parts of the world, at least part of pathologists’ work has become “digital,” i.e., conventional routine replaced by digital images.