DONATEDIGITAL PATHOLOGY SERVICES
In a swift move, to embrace Artificial Intelligence, the department of Oncopathology became an early adopter of Digital Pathology by procuring the Hamamatsu Nano Zoomer S210 whole slide (www.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/product), in 2020. This system has not only enabled us in digitalization of selected cases of interest, it has also helped in modernization of teaching and research methodologies. These selected case based images can be utilized for sharing and discussion with the pioneers of reputed institutes, overseas, especially for a challenging or rare case and can be utilized for management of patients in a multidisciplinary setting.
Digital pathology is a dynamic, image-based environment that enables the acquisition, management and interpretation of pathology information generated from a digitized glass slide (Digital Pathology Association definition) (digitalpathologyassociation.org). The digital pathology is not only a scanned whole slide images (H&E and IHC), it includes integration of patient’s clinical data, laboratory reports, radiology, specimen gross images and digital whole slide images in one system, leading to generation of a pathology report. With adoption of uniform image standard like ‘DICOM’ (www.dicomstandard.org) across the specialties, it may soon become a reality.
The department is building its data base of interesting cases for teaching and shares them on department blog (www.pathbliss.com) on regular basis. The department has contributed multiple images from its archive to World Health Organization (WHO), for consideration in upcoming 6th edition of Head & Neck Cancer blue book series. Moreover, during this pandemic, when postal and courier services are stretched thin, the Digital pathology system has proved to be a boon for our external quality control program (EQAS), as it enabled us to share our images with the external agencies, for proficiency testing, over the cloud. We hope to share WSI images online with interactive interface soon. The department also participates in digital imaging projects and undertakes annotation of digital slides.
