Introduction to digital pathology: What is digital pathology and why it matters

According to Cancer Research UK lifetime risk of developing cancer disease is more than 42% for anyone of us. Imagine this number. 1 in 2 people will develop cancer in their lifetime, it’s every second of us. 18M new cancer cases were registered in 2018. More than 50% of that people died.
World Health Organization predicts rapid increase in these numbers in the coming decades, due to the obvious reasons such as:

• Aging population;
• Population growth in the developing countries;
• Enviromental problems;
• Cancer risk increasing lifestyle;
• Lack of experts;
• Inaccurate diagnosis;
• Conflicting medical conclusions;
• Late diagnosis;
• Global lockdown;

Inaccurate diagnosis is more than 10% of the cases even in USA. In other parts of the world the situation is much worse. Accurate and on time diagnosis is crucial for an effective treatment of a cancer or any other type of pathology.

But conflictive medical conclusions and late treatment make us lose time.
Moreover, Millions of people in the world have no access at all to this diagnosis. For the diagnosis of cancer, a histological/pathological analysis is needed. But 150-year-old traditional pathology workflows (where doctors use microscopes to examine tissues from biopsy) are limited in many ways:

• Shortage of experts worldwide, there is only one pathologist for more than 130 patients and the majority of the good specialists are located in certain countries;
• Long lasting procedures;
• Fragile histological glasses that need to be sent from one center to another (sometimes abroad);
• Subjective analysis, etc.

This results in the loss of time, diagnosis error & thousands of deaths that could be avoided. Digital pathology addresses all these main limitations, bringing advanced technologies into the day-to-day cancer/pathology control.

Everything started with the invention of virtual microscopy and histology slide scanner that allows to digitize the physical slides from biopsy (tissue) and convert them into WSI (Whole slide images). After that they are imported to a software platform called PACS (Picture archiving and communication system) where the digital copies of histological slides (medical WSI images) can be examined via computer instead of a microscope. There you can share, do collegial analysis, use tools for annotation, use AI and computer vision to make the diagnosis much faster and more precise.

Difference between traditional and digital pathology (also known as telepathology) workflows

Benefits of digital pathology for the patient:

• Free access to his/her histological slides (including the old ones) anytime.
• The ability to get second medical opinion from a doctor the patient trusts regardless of the location of the specialist by providing a link to his/her medical data instead of:

1. Sending histological slides via post
2. Personal visit to the specialist
3. Conducting a second biopsy

Benefits of digital pathology for the doctor:

• The ability to work with histological slides by using the computer monitor instead of the microscope that would allow to use morphometrical analysis tools during the diagnostics process.
• The ability to work from anywhere in the world that has access to internet.
• The ability to request help from colleagues regarding complex medical cases (collegial analysis).
• The ability to access and compare the patient’s histological slides promptly, without waiting for access to the archive.
• The ability of convenient comparison of the patient’s histological slide on one screen for analysis of dynamics of disease development.
• The ability to use diagnostic automation tools, aka medical decision support systems during diagnostics.

Benefits of digital pathology for a medical center:

• Ability to start providing a new service on the market — digitization of histological slides.
• Opportunity to expand the staff of pathologists (foreign doctors, consultant staff from other medical institutions).
• Ability to create a digital archive of histological slides.
• Reducing the cost of laboratory equipment since computers are used for diagnosis instead of expensive microscopes.

And last, but not least: digital pathology is very useful for universities and university students for doing research or teaching pathology without having access to expensive microscopes, even from home.

Digital pathology makes pathology diagnosis much faster and more accurate. It also allows patients and doctors to travel less and work from home which is very important, especially now during Covid-19 pandemic.

We will talk about the components of digital pathology (slide scanners, PACS platforms, AI decision support systems, etc.) and startups working in this field in our future articles.

Stay tuned and follow us on Medium. If you have any questions feel free to contact us via: roza@medpoint.ai or follow MedPoint Technologies on Linkedin.