Digital/Tele-pathology

[Substance]

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Anatomic pathology, like radiology, works with images primarily. The difference is that radiology uses PACS, whereas pathology still uses 300 year old technology in the form of microscopes.

It is likely that pathology will adopt a PACS-like system for slides in the future, but the question is "when?"

Also, why hasn't there been more of a shift towards digitizing slides as the standard? Or is there and I'm just not aware of it?

 

[LADoc00]

Anatomic pathology, like radiology, works with images primarily. The difference is that radiology uses PACS, whereas pathology still uses 300 year old technology in the form of microscopes.

It is likely that pathology will adopt a PACS-like system for slides in the future, but the question is "when?"

Also, why hasn't there been more of a shift towards digitizing slides as the standard? Or is there and I'm just not aware of it?

there has been alot of discussion of this topic here, do a search for "telepathology" and other such terms via the SDN search function.

 

[yaah]

Also, why hasn't there been more of a shift towards digitizing slides as the standard? Or is there and I'm just not aware of it?

I think the short answer to that includes 1) bandwidth, 2) memory (a path slide is about a billion times bigger than the largest radiology file), and 3) lack of improvement in care. To digitize a slide you have to still prepare the slide, then scan it in. Instead of scanning it in, it is faster and cheaper to just look at it.

 

[SomeDoc]

I think the short answer to that includes 1) bandwidth, 2) memory (a path slide is about a billion times bigger than the largest radiology file)...

I remember learning from a pathology resource on this topic, that a single path slide can be several gigabytes in size!

 

[2121115]

Rather than fully scanned slides, digital interface is the next wave in pathology. Bar coded H&E slides fed into a microscope that has a real time digital interface that allows you to take pics easily, mark and measure (like rads), and various other cool stuff. No significant memory necessary and still quite cheap.