![]() ![]() A further issue with sending over glass slides is that the receiving department does not always send back all the slides because they need to archive the reviewed slides.Īnother logistical challenge involves pathology expert panels, where pathologists discuss difficult and/or interesting samples to reach consensus at a multiheaded microscope, requiring many pathologists to travel to a central laboratory with obvious loss of productivity. It also serves to translate the report into local usual and up-to-date language and ensures that material is available for demonstration at multidisciplinary meetings and for comparison with new material (eg, biopsies from metastases). Finally, during this process, patients are eagerly awaiting the final report with their diagnosis, treatments are delayed, and patient anxiety levels are high, often causing patients to call in sick.Ī similar process takes place when patients are referred to another hospital, in which case it is customary to ship the pathology material to reassess (revise) the patient’s situation because revision may take into account new information on the patient and hence the diagnosis may be adjusted or errors may be corrected. Patient reports can easily be taken from broken or opened packages during transportation, breaching patient privacy. In addition, it is also error prone slides may be broken during transportation or even get lost completely. This is an expensive and laborious logistic process that easily takes up to 2 weeks, depending on distances and adequacy of traditional mail logistics. Traditionally, such consultations take place by sending slides through mail back and forth. 1 Such specialists may not always be at hand locally, especially in smaller general practices, in which case a colleague in another practice can be consulted. Because erroneous diagnoses may lead to inadequate treatment of patients, it is often necessary to consult more specialized colleagues. In view of the explosion of knowledge in medical science, it has become impossible for the practicing pathologist to keep up with the developments in all fields and maintain sufficient diagnostic knowledge in every area. Pathology is a broad medical specialty covering cell and tissue diagnostics of all organs and body parts. Pathology Image Exchange was released in April 2018 after technical validation, and a first successful validation in real life has been performed for hematopathology cases. In this article, we describe the setup and validation of the Pathology Image Exchange project, which aimed to create a vendor-independent platform for exchange of whole-slide images between Dutch pathology laboratories to facilitate efficient teleconsultation, telerevision, and virtual slide panels. This poses high demands on the setup of such a platform, given the inherent complexity of the handling of digital pathology images. More importantly, a software platform is needed for exchange of these images and functionality to support the processes around discussing and reporting on these images without breaching patient privacy. This requires basic slide scanner infrastructure in participating laboratories to produce whole-slide images. Among the many uses of digital pathology, remote consultation, remote revision, and virtual slide panels may be the most important ones.
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