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Did you know that pathology diagnostics through a smartphone is a thing?
Really and officially! It is called static telecytology and a lot has already been published on it (see RESOURCES BELOW).

This episode's guest, Dr. Kate Baker, a veterinary clinical pathologist, developed a smartphone app for veterinary telecytology! This digital pathology smartphone app is called pocket pathologist and let's you get access to a veterinary pathologist opinion remotely.

This app was developed for practicing veterinarians who want or need to consult telecytology cases with a board certified pathologist.

This technology can be used for other areas of static telepathology including rapid on site evaluation (ROSE) and Dr. Kate is giving us a sneak peek into the app development and how it was for a veterinarian to work with an app development team (and NO, it does not cost a million dollars  ).

This great little tool for remote pathology diagnostics is a proof that anyone, regardless of their budget can leverage the power of digital pathology to offer or access better care for their patients. You only need a microscope, a smartphone and smartphone adapter (to save time and take better pictures).

So don't hesitate to check it out: https://www.pocketpathologist.com/
THIS EPISODE'S RESOURCES:

• PREVIOUS PODCAST EPISODE WITH KATE: Digital veterinary cytology and social media teaching w/ Kate Baker, Veterinary Cytology Schoolhouse
• POCKET PATHOLOGIST APP 
• KATE'S WEBSITE - VETERINARY CYTOLOGY SCHOOLHOUSE 
• KATE'S VETERINARY CYTOLOGY ONLINE COURSES 
• SKOPED MICRO PHONE ATTACHMENT 
• IMPACT OF PHOTOGRAPHER EXPERIENCE AND NUMBER OF IMAGES ON TELECYTOLOGY ACCURACY. (Veterinary Clinical Pathology - Journal Article)
• HOW TO TAKE STUNNING MICROSCOPIC IMAGES WITH YOUR PHONE - DOWNLOADABLE GUIDE
• THE VETERINARY CYTOLOGY SCHOOLHOUSE FACEBOOK GROUP

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 This is a joint podcast episode where the hosts of "Beyond the Scope" - the official Digital Pathology Association podcast and the host of the "Digital Pathology Podcast" meet to talk about what is going on in our discipline. 

Together David Tulman, Giovanni Lujan, and Aleksandra Zuraw cover the current digital pathology topics such as digital pathology guidelines for clinical and non-clinical pathology, digital pathology adoption in clinical pathology settings and pharmaceutical pathology as well as how the pandemic influenced the adoption of digital pathology. 

This episode is different than most of our episodes and it is really fun to listen to so stay till the end! 

THIS EPISODE'S RESOURCES

YouTube Version of THIS episode is here.

Digital Pathology Podcast episode with David Tulman, Instapath: 

AUDIO: https://digitalpathologyplace.com/pod...

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wECId...

Podcasts with Chen Sagiv, DeePathology:

Digital pathology Podcast: https://youtu.be/DrEUnkYkN28

Beyond the Scope: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast...

Podcasts with David Clunie, Pixelmed Publishing:

Digital Pathology Podcast: https://digitalpathologyplace.com/pod...

Beyond the Scope: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

Pathology Visions 2022 registration page:

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Have you ever wondered what semi-supervised, weekly, and unsupervised artificial intelligence digital pathology models can do to help pathologists?

Can we finally stop annotating???

This episode's guest Geert Litjens - a member of the computational pathology group at Radboud University Medical Center explains how semi-supervised and weekly supervised artificial intelligence-based image analysis can help pathologists do better, more time-efficient, and data-efficient digital pathology.

The supervised deep learning image analysis methods are used often and are well accepted in the digital pathology scientific community, however, they rely heavily on whole slide image annotations. This is very time-consuming and is subjected to annotator to annotator variability.

There has been a lot of research going on in the computational pathology community on the semi and weakly supervised approaches. It turns out that those approaches are starting to match the results delivered by the supervised approaches.

Are we there yet? Can we stop annotating pathology slides altogether and rely on the slide-level labels?

Listen to the full episode to learn more + share with friends!

This episodes resources:

1. Aiosyn website
2. StreamingCNN
3. Pathology streaming pipeline
4. Streaming  CNNs for Multi-Megapixel Images (article)
5. DALL-E-2 network that generates artworks from descriptions in natural language 

Other podcast episodes you'll enjoy:

1. Bigpicture - the largest whole slide repository for AI model development in pathology. Where do we stand at month 15/72?
2. 5 Ways to make histopathology image models more robust to domain shift w/ Heather Couture, Pixel Scientia Labs

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There are a few websites online other than the Digital Pathology Place that talk about different aspects of digital pathology. An important one being Pathology News.

Pathology News is an online place bringing together the digital pathology vendors and purchasers. It is meant to be a single community for everyone working in the digital pathology space. A community working together on advancing the digital pathology science. 

A unique (and my favorite!) feature of the website, NOT AVAILABLE ANYWHERE ELSE ONLINE, is a special page where digital pathology users have access to detailed information about available digital pathology solutions provided by the digital pathology vendors.

It is like a 24/7 online digital pathology conference where the users can visit vendor space any time they need a specific piece of information, and they can visit multiple vendor spaces and compare their solutions. 

All from the comfort of their home without having to call or interact with a single vendor representative before they are ready.

This space is called the Technology Buyers guide.

In addition to this unique vendor-purchaser interactive tool Pathology News has other elements:

- scientific articles
- latest digital pathology news
- list of upcoming digital pathology events
- digital pathology career section with the latest vacancies

and now also...[drum roll please]......

A PODCAST SECTION with the DIGITAL PATHOLOGY PODCAST

We partnered to serve the largest audience possible

Digital Pathology Place and Pathology News are both on a mission to advance digital pathology in the scientific community and we want to serve the largest audience possible. We are doing it in a very complementary way that builds bridges within the multidisciplinary environment of digital pathology.

This is why we partnered to make the Digital Pathology Podcast available to the Pathology News readers straight from the Pathology News website and from their mailbox for those who are subscribed to the monthly newsletter.

Listen to the full episode to meet Jonathon Tunstall, the CEO of Pathology News and learn what else you can find on the website.

This episode's resources:

• Pathology News website
• Pathology News Technology Buyers guide
  • Scan and capture
  • Image and data management
  • Quantitative image analysis and AI
  • Contract services
• Pathology News Podcast section

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Deep learning artificial intelligence has entered the field of digital pathology and is here to stay because it consistently outperforms the classical image analysis methods on pathology slides.

The only caveat is that to train good deep learning image analysis models we need a lot of whole slide images.

Where do we get them? Is there a central repository that can be used for this purpose?

Good news, there is one in the making!

There is an ongoing  project to create a very large repository of several million whole slide images accessible for the digital pathology  community. It is called BIGPICTURE and in this podcast you will learn about it from the experts.

This episode's guests, two of the project leaders - Julie Boisclair from Novartis and Jeroen van der Laak from the computational pathology group at  RadboudUMC are explaining the 

• who
• what
• how and 
• when of the BigPicture project. 

Listen to the full episode to learn all about it.

This episode's resources:

• BigPicture project website
• IMI - BigPicture: A Central Repository for Digital Pathology - publication

Episodes you might also like:

• 5 ways to make histopathology image models more robust to domain shift w/ Heather Couture, Pixel Scientia Labs
• Why Machine learning expertise is needed for digital pathology projects w/ heather Couture, Pixel Scientia Labs 

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Digital pathology is supposed to help pathologists provide better patient care and make their lives easier, but what about other doctors, do they even care? Maybe radiologists? Oncologists? Nope…Dermatologists! They do care!

And they are the clients of Pathology Watch – a CLIA lab specializing in dermatopathology, that is currently servicing samples from over 65 dermatology clinics in the USA. 

Pathology Watch provides an end-to-end digital pathology solution for dermatologists. From processing the samples sent by the dermatologists, through the dermatopathology report to the whole slide image of the diagnosed sample, and all this browser-based and integrated with the dermatology clinic’s electronic medical record (EMR) systems. This provides a completely non-disruptive workflow. 

Pathology Watch is providing a true end-to-end solution built around dermatologists. 

The EMR integration saves the dermatologists time (25h/ month!!! Who would not want to have that?!?) and whole slide images build the bridge between and improve the communication on the “patient-dermatologist-pathologist” line. 

Dermatologists can show the images of the cases to the patients, and they can see the highlighted areas used by the pathologist when diagnosing the case.  

Once the digitization and intersystem integration take care of the time savings it’s time to step up the game!  The next step is using artificial intelligence for better dermatopathology diagnostics and to gain even more time savings. Pathology Watch designed its AI pipeline specifically to bypass the known industry problem of generalizability of AI models. 

It is extremely difficult to train generalizable models on samples from different institutions, but if the samples are processed in just one lab in a very controlled environment, using automated equipment and performing rigorous quality control, the pre-analytical variability causing a lack of generalizability is taken care of. 

As in any digital pathology operation, troubleshooting is part of the business. What do you do when your scanner breaks down? How do you store the digital pathology images effectively in a cost-efficient way? And how do you deliver the slides in the browser FAST? 

It took the Pathology Watch team a few years to solve those and other challenges and come up with good mitigation strategies. 

Do you want to know how they did it? Listen to the full episode to learn more from Dan Lambert, the CEO of Pathology Watch. 

This Episodes resources

Pathology Watch website  

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A common misconception about digital pathology is that it is synonymous with whole slide imaging and has a high price point. This is not the case, as one can enter the digital pathology world and benefit from what it has to offer with a simple microscope camera. If we would like a more sophisticated solution, but don't want to get a whole slide scanner or don't have the use case or business case to justify it, no worries, there is enough to choose from!

In this episode, Mike Miller from I.Miller Microscopes is taking us through all the different levels and price points of digital pathology solutions from a simple microscope camera to a whole slide scanner explaining everything in between. 

The digital pathology solutions discussed in this episode include:

1. Simple microscope camera + imaging software for image capture
   • For teaching and learning
   • For capturing static images
     • presentations
     • publications
     • tumor boards
   • For screen sharing on communication platforms (e.g. zoom, teams, etc.)
2. Microscope camera with a network port allowing for live streaming
   • For intraoperative evaluation by an on-site or off-site pathologist
     • fine-needle aspirates
     • frozen sections
3.  Live remote control telepathology system
   1. Live remote control telepathology system with low throughput screening capabilities (aka hybrid system)
      • For use in remote areas without access to pathologists
4. Whole slide scanners
   • For high throughput digital pathology workflows on formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) material

Listen to the full episode to learn the details and the price points of each solution!

This episode resources:

• I. Miller Microscopes website
• Microscope central website
• Path 4k  - high-resolution microscope camera
  • [DPP FAVORITE] Digital Pathology Place is a proud affiliate for the Path4K microscope camera, if you are interested in a quote, fill the form in the link and simply write in the message that you heard about it on our podcast.

Episodes you might also like:

• Digital pathology in a suitcase. How Grundium's portable whole slide scanning microscope expands the reach of telepathology w/ Mika Kuisma, Grundium

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This episode is brought to you by Visiopharm. 

With the regulatory approvals of whole slide imaging systems, digital pathology became the modality for routine diagnostics. Digitalization of pathology is aiming at increasing precision and productivity in the pathology lab, but the adoption of this field is slower than expected. 

One of the causes of the slow adoption is that going digital in a pathology lab means a much bigger investment than just the cost of the whole slide scanners for slide digitization. Additional costs include digital storage and infrastructure, slide and workflow management, and connectivity to lab information systems. 

Because the improvements in precision and productivity gained by going digital are modest at best, a higher value is expected from image analysis and artificial intelligence. 

The research and diagnostic applications of image analysis have been explored for decades already and many have found great use in the research-diagnostics continuum. However, a large need for the standardization of tissue diagnostic assays remains unmet. 

Standardization of the staining and of the diagnostic interpretation of tests would tremendously benefit pathology and patient care. So far, the standardization efforts focused on the interpretation part of the puzzle. Several quantification algorithms have been developed, many of which received regulatory clearance. At the same time, the IHC assays on which the algorithms are based often lack standardization, and this is where more effort should be put. 

Currently, only pathology institutions that go fully digital reap the digital pathology benefits. There is not an efficient way to start slowly, rather it seems to be “all or nothing”. Enabling institutions to embark on the digital pathology journey in an incremental fashion would change the digital pathology landscape and significantly increase the adoption of this technology. 

The more value on different fronts digital pathology can provide to institutions and patients, the more the adoption will increase. And we have not yet explored all the ways in which value can be provided. 

Listen to the full episode to learn about it in more detail and visit Visiopharm’s website, to learn how they are contributing to the digital transformation in pathology. 

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Visiopharm is a company offering image analysis software used on pathology images. The software has been on the market for over 20 years and has evolved through the transition of digital microscopy to digital pathology. Digital microscopy provided static tissue images captured through the microscope camera and only branched out into digital pathology with the wider availability and adoption of whole slide scanners. Image analysis spans digital microscopy and digital pathology, and image analysis methods had to evolve in parallel with the imaging technologies to address the hypercomplex pathology problems. 

The complexity of digital pathology problems and research questions increases with every additional stain and scientific discovery. Visiopharm’s team challenged themselves by providing an image analysis solution capable of addressing this hypercomplexity and enabling researchers to advance scientifically with their tool. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities applied to computer vision problems took tissue image analysis to a whole new level and incorporating AI into the Visiopharm software tremendously increased the accessibility of this method. 

In addition to the two well-known technologies that enabled digital pathology breakthroughs (whole slide imaging and AI), two other important advancements happened during the last two decades

·       emphasis on interoperability between different digital pathology systems 

·       advances in the field of data visualization. 

Together these four components are driving the progress of digital pathology both on the diagnostic and research front. 

During the last 20 years Visiopharm grew significantly, both organically and through funding and they continue creating value and powerful image analysis tools for the tissue image analysis community. 

Listen to the full episode with Visiopharm’s CEO Michael Grunkin to learn more about this 20-year perspective on what happened in the field of digital microscopy and digital pathology. 

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