What is Digital Pathology?
Digital pathology is the use of computer programs to analyze tissues on digitized glass slides. Digital pathology can unlock powerful tools to assist with personalized medicine, diagnostics, education, and research.
Here at the University of Utah and at ARUP we have a new program in digital pathology. In collaboration with the Institute of Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) and by implementing commercial software solutions, we use machine learning and deep learning/A.I. image analysis software to obtain cell phenotyping and spatial cell profiling data from regular pathology slides (staining with Hematoxylin and Eosin) and from tissues stained with antibodies or DNA probes. Including digital pathology in clinical workflows will empower pathologists to improve patient care.
Digital Pathology at the U
We are building a digital pathology infrastructure for the future of histopathology. An investment in digital pathology will automate today’s manual glass slide evaluations and generate scalable pathology operations that will serve patients with the highest quality data for diagnosis and treatment planning.
We imagine that in the future this infrastructure will allow pathologists to:
- work from remote locations
- access to all slides organized in a virtual slide tray
- focus on critical diagnostic tasks and won’t need to spend time on tedious sign-out components
- integrate data related to diagnosis, prognosis and treatment decisions in a point-of-care setting
- have a major voice for patient management and treatment decisions
We also imagine that computers will:
- be able to count cells and provide quantitative immunohistochemistry readouts
- screen out normal slides
- provide a second opinion