Routine and computer-aided diagnoses in the pathology laboratory

The interpretation and quantification of diseases by examining a tissue section depends on the knowledge and skill of an individual pathologist and is therefore inherently affected by a certain level of subjectivity. The worldwide shortage of pathologists exacerbates the related problems. Virtual microscopy can immensely help on improving on this in a variety of ways, increasing both the reliability as well as the speed of diagnosis. 

Using virtual slides opens the way for more objective and faster analysis of slides simply by the fact that slides can be so easily and quickly accessed remotely, even by pathologists located in different towns.

In addition, virtual slides can be more thoroughly and with less risk of errors linked to electronic hospital data management systems. When fully integrated, virtual slides can be available from within a hospital patient database or a pathology workflow software by just a mouseclick, without any need to access a glass archive.

Finally, virtual slides pave the road for software-assisted diagnosis, a subject that will become immensely important in future as the pressure to increase objectivity of diagnosis will increase.

In the medical field, efficiency and sharing of information are proportional. To illustrate this, think about rare case diagnoses. Some diseases are so rare and come with very variable morphology that even highly skilled experts will submit opinions that show variation. This indicates that really a collection of experts is needed to reliably diagnose such cases. This is one aspect where virtual microscopy may become indispensable to improve diagnoses, both in quality and time, under the circumstance that availability of experts is scarce.

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In fact, where several days or weeks would be needed to send the physical slides to each expert, every expert of the network can access simultaneously and remotely a virtual slide simply over the Internet, making diagnoses possible much quicker. In addition, there's no risk of losing or damaging a valuable physical slide during transport.

The network access to the virtual slides is protected by password and data security is guaranteed.

Each pathologist can add own annotations on a slide and decide whether they shall be visible to other pathologists or not. Unlike working with physical glass slides, these annotations do not alter the visibility of the tissue and do not interfere with each other.

Fields of applications

• Routine clinical pathology, incl. primary diagnosis, meetings, consultation, 2nd opinion
• Expert network organizations
• Private pathology centers
• Instant frozen section diagnosis over the Internet
• Research image networks, cancer research centers, tumor banks, etc.