Digital pathology offers significant advantages to pathology laboratories within academic institutions. In addition to clinical activities, for which digital pathology has already shown significant improvements in workflow efficiency and accuracy, such laboratories have missions of research and education, both of which can also be enhanced in the digital environment. Case-based research projects and educational activities require the use of whole slide images (WSIs) derived from the clinical workflow. But cases flowing into these activities have specific requirements and workflows of the ..read more

The ICC Profile: What Is It and Why Is It Important When Considering Digital Pathology Technologies? Consistency and reliability of image quality is more important than ever as the adoption of digital pathology increases across clinical, education and research workflows. The International Color Consortium (ICC) has developed a set of standards to be applied in the management of color for digital images. In color management, the ICC profile is a set of data that characterizes a color input or output device or a color space according to standards promulgated by the Consortium ..read more

This line, of course, was made popular in a scene from The Phantom Menace: Episode 1. A deadly fish is chasing Qui-Gon and others underwater, and that fish gets taken down by a bigger fish. As fishermen, we often use this line after catching a good sized fish, but not a huge fish. You get your bait, jig, crankbait or other contraption you have come up with back in the water to catch a bigger fish. Over the past three decades, this has been a constant theme in healthcare and laboratory medicine. Mergers and acquisitions are commonplace, and while the big fish have swallowed up the little ..read more

Anatomic Pathology has been experiencing a major paradigm shift over the past several years as digital technology provides new ways of performing the daily work. Changes in workflow are affecting all aspects of pathology, whether clinical, research or education. The early years of whole-slide-scanning offered academic institutions a way to provide teaching sets, resident collections and publication images without requiring technical staff to perform additional recuts, staining procedures and handling of blocks and slides. While there was indeed clinical utilization of telepathology techn ..read more

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My maternal grandfather was a glazier. He was orphaned at a young age and raised in an orphanage on the West side of Chicago with 2 brothers. One of those brothers died during adolescence. My grandfather and his oldest brother fought in World War II and became part of America’s Greatest Generation. He and his brother started Chicago Glass which became the largest glazier company in the city. For over 30 years, my grandfather hung glass on some of the tallest buildings in the world at the time. Sears Tower, John Hancock, Lake Point Tower, Standard Oil, you name it, he worked on it. Buildings d ..read more

On Tuesday, December 6 at 9 am ET, The Pathologist will be hosting a forum on Digital Pathology & Artificial Intelligence. Dr. David Wilbur, Corista’s Chief Scientific Officer, will join speakers from Dell, Inify Laboratories, Owkin and Proscia to discuss these technologies and their role in Pathology. Dr. Wilbur focuses on how the use cases and workflow solutions of digital pathology compare to those in the clinical environment. While both of these are well established in the clinical setting, image management systems need some additional features to satisfy the requirements for research ..read more

A radiologist, an internist, a surgeon and a pathologist go duck hunting. The radiologist is up first and a flock of ducks fly overhead. He raises his shotgun but does not shoot. The surgeon asked him why he didn’t shoot to which the radiologist replied, “They had the outline of ducks, their contrast looked like ducks, but I wasn’t sure they were ducks.” The internist is up next. When the next flock flies overhead, he raises his shotgun in the air but does not shoot. The surgeon, getting irate at what is happening, asked the internist why he did not shoot to which the internist replied, “They ..read more

The strains of the last two plus years have forced us to make many changes to our daily routines, both on a personal and a professional level. Remote interactions have become the norm, with families “zooming” for the holidays and family events, elbow bumps instead of hand-shakes, and remote work conferences and meetings in all walks of life. We are all looking forward to the return to many of our previous lifestyles, but the old adage remains true, out of adversity comes opportunity ..read more

There is a joke among surgeons and oncologists -- the pathologist at a tumor board is like the guy whose funeral that you are attending; you can't do it without him, but you don't want him saying too much.  Nearly 2 years ago, our tumor boards went "virtual". Like billions around the world, we scrambled to get Zoom, GoToMeeting, WebEx and other applications up and running to hear each other’s voices and share screens to show radiology and pathology images. We anticipated that by the Summer or Fall we would be back to "normal ..read more