It -might- change in a significant way in my lifetime (50+ more years, with some luck), but to be honest, I suspect it will take longer. A few very specific methods for very specific tumors or sites -might- crop up without the need for traditional AP, but there's just nothing in the pipeline that I'm aware of that I think has a reasonable chance to replace glass slides in a major fundamental shift kind of way. Stains might change, slides might be scanned in, new tests will arrive, old tests will fade, etc., but AP/CP will remain and I believe the basic methodology is very likely to remain for a long time still. Not necessarily because there's nothing better to be done, but (in part) because such a titanic shift is essentially impossible these days -- despite all the lip service paid to "research", real risk taking innovation is pretty crippled, but that's a tradeoff we take in exchange for a fairly stable, predictable, and reasonably trustworthy health system (compared to the Good Ol' Days of unregulated practitioners and pharmacologicals, anyway).
If by "imaging" you mean various radiology methods, this is a common query from the mainstream media/layperson, but for all radiology has done and can do, it's nowhere remotely close to replacing AP, much less CP. Its pathology related strengths are still mainly to locate suspicious areas for AP evaluation; it can certainly help narrow the differential, of course. As for the so-called in-vivo microscopy imaging interpreted by non-paths, it's barely out of fetal development, though also gets a lot of press -- but it remains to be seen whether it will be just another way to waste money or can reliably perform..in limited situations..on par with AP/CP, financially as well as diagnostically and in outcome measures. In some cases it has its own "new" niche while not taking anything from pathologists, such as in-vivo examination of coronary arteries or retinas, but realistically still has a way to go.
