Dr. Sylvia Asa (University Health Network, Toronto), Mr. Dirk Soenksen (Aperio, Vista, CA) and myself will address cultural and strategic barriers to adoption of digital pathology.  Each one of these webinar series sessions will be moderated by Robert McGonnagle, publisher of CAP Today.  

Having been a part of the discussion and getting a quick look and the other speakers' slide decks in advance of our session in a couple of weeks, think this is going to be a good series on what the challenges and barriers are in digital pathology adoption in the clinical space and some insights as to how to overcome them.  

Join us May 9 by registering below.

BARRIERS TO ADOPTION OF DIGITAL PATHOLOGY

REGISTRATION IS FREE. REGISTER TODAY.

The Digital Pathology Association (DPA) in partnership with the Association of Pathology Informatics and CAP Today will host a series of four, one-hour webinars in 2012 focusing on the barriers to adoption of digital pathology. The topics to be addressed during the webinars include: a cultural and strategic perspective, regulatory issues, financial aspects of deployment, and technical considerations.

Each session will be moderated by Robert McGonnagle, publisher of CAP Today. Each of the four webinar sessions will include several experts in the field who will deliver short & focused presentations, and then will interact with McGonnagle and attendees about the major points presented.

These webinars will serve as a bridge between the recent, comprehensive article about regulatory aspects of digital pathology that appeared in CAP Today (see:Regulators Scanning the Digital Scanners) and the two most important, national conferences focusing on digital pathology, Pathology Visions 2012, the annual conference of the DPA, to be held October 28-31, 2012 and Pathology Informatics 2012 to be held October 9 – 12, 2012 in Chicago.

Mark your calendar from 11 AM EST to 12 Noon EST for the following dates: 

May 9| Cultural and Strategic Barriers to the adoption of Digital Pathology 

Featuring: Dr. Sylvia Asa, Dirk Soenksen of Aperio & Dr. Keith Kaplan 

July 25 | Financial Barriers to the Adoption of Digital Pathology

September 19 | Technical Barriers to the Adoption of Digital Pathology

November 14 | Regulatory Barriers to the Adoption of Digital Pathology

There will be no charge for participating in these webinars, however advance registration is required. Click HERE to register. The archived version of the webinars will be made available to DPA Members only. More details about these events will be published as they become available including the names of the participating faculty members.

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 25, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Telemedicine, once a specialty niche, is quickly becoming a new standard of care for hospitals and healthcare providers across America. Driven by patient demand and an imperative to improve healthcare quality and accessibility, telemedicine is now a near-requirement for modern medical institutions. Organizations not adopting these technologies expose themselves to declining clinical outcomes, loss of market-share and potential litigation.

"You can no longer afford to ignore telemedicine or offer it only as a peripheral service," said Jon Linkous, CEO of the American Telemedicine Association. "Providers that don't integrate telemedicine into their delivery models are limiting patient access to the best on-demand care possible. They are also losing out to their competitors who are using the technology to improve care, reduce costs and expand their markets."

The importance of telemedicine as a standard of care is evident in several areas:

Increased patient demand for telemedicine. According to ATA over 10 million Americans are now directly benefitting from telemedicine each year.

State mandates for insurance coverage of telehealth services. 15 states have now passed laws requiring private payers to cover services provided via telemedicine. The foundation for this legislation is that patients should receive the best care, regardless of whether an on-site provider is available.

A growing standard of care: Practically every hospital in the country uses telemedicine to assure 24/7 access to professional radiology services. Similar use is now growing for many other specialty services. So it is not surprising that patient and consumer groups are starting to expect such access everywhere. In fact, several recent lawsuits (that were later settled out of court) were filed against hospitals for not providing telemedicine services.

Organizations and individuals interested in learning more about telemedicine are encouraged to attend the ATA 2012 Annual Meeting, April 29-May 1, 2012 in San Jose, California. ATA 2012 is the world's largest telemedicine, telehealth and mHealth event, with 450 presentations and an exhibit hall with 200 product and service vendors. This year, over 4,500 healthcare professionals--clinicians, administrators, entrepreneurs, IT specialists, engineers and more--are expected to attend. Free passes for the ATA 2012 Exhibit Hall are available. For more information, visit http://www.ATA2012.com .

The American Telemedicine Association is the leading resource and advocate promoting the use of advanced remote medical technologies. ATA and its diverse membership work to fully integrate telemedicine into healthcare systems to improve quality, equity and affordability of healthcare throughout the world. Established in 1993, ATA is headquartered in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit http://www.americantelemed.org .

Source: American Telemedicine Association

Frequent readers know I am a fan of cloud computing, hosted services and/or software or SAAS, IAAS, PAAS, web-based computing, etc...

Of course, cloud computing or any of the other acronyms or names is not new. The idea of utilizing remote servers or applications is as old as the most primitive networks. That is the premise for networks.

More recently, remote services, technology, applications that are maintained and served have become increasingly common for everything from enterprise e-mail solutions through Microsoft, for example, to image analysis applications.

As a consumer, I can get the latest version without the hassles of updates, upgrades or routine support that may normally be necessary with local applications or installations.

As a healthcare provider, particularly for organizations without a deep IT bench, the ability to outsource functionality to another provider can often mean lower costs without sacrificing reliability, support, security or access.

Digital pathology allows for "anytime, anywhere" review of pathology images (slides, cases) that can be viewed by the right person at the right time.  These images themselves can be locally served or hosted to be viewed but in order to report the diagnosis/findings in order to create a final surgical pathology report and a legal document requires access to the appropriate laboratory infromation system in order to do so.

This can be accomplished with remote services such as Citrix connectivity, remote desktop protocols, terminal server configurations or a host of others to allow for secure remote access.

Or we can leverage the power of the cloud and hosted functionality that provides a platform for remote signout over the web.  

Many laboratory information system vendors offer web-based signout to facilitate shared access regardless of where a particular individual may be, as mentioned previously on this blog, including a post about signing out cases from 35,000 feet, above the cloud(s).

Recently I had a chance to take a look at a hosted LIS available as a mobile application on my 4G iPad 3 from PathX.

A little skeptical of actually signing out cases from my iPhone or iPad, I assumed a very rudimentary experience that would look nothing like a conventional worklist-driven solution to present cases for review and signature.  Instead what I saw was just that - worklist of cases pending signature and release in the palm of my hand.  

Once you launch the application, you are presented with your worklist of completed cases which you can select, preview and verify.

Within the application is some other functionality including a Twitter feed from the vendor as well as Dark Daily updates, ability for clients to order supplies and some setting controls that are user defined.

Considering the value proposition of digital pathology, that one is no longer tethered to their microscope, their histology laboratory, and now their LIS, the added functionality of mobile review and signout facilitates a critical component of "anytime, anywhere" review AND signout.

This technology raises a major question in my mind, namely, what/where constitutes the point of service, a critical component of CLIA regulations in terms of "where the pathologist was sitting when he/she made the diagnosis".  Legitimately, this could still have been in a professional office setting with a CLIA license when the diagnosis was rendered, dictated and transcribed.  The act of verifying/certifying that report as accurate may or may not be another matter.  More on this in a subsequent post. 

In the meantime, if you are in the market for an LIS solution and considering a hosted solution, consider PathX, with the added functionality of mobile sign-out.

http://www.definiens.com/community/symposium.html

Researchers at the University of Leeds say their digital scanning system produces high-res images that can be rotated.

Today, pathologists and researchers must cut super-thin slices of tissue samples to view them on a microscope -- a labor-intensive process that renders 3D images created from hundreds of 2D sections prohibitively expensive.

Not to mention tedious to construct. Imagine if a single scene in Halo was presented as a series of 2D images one must perfectly align before getting the lay of, say, a single battleground.

A 3D rendering of cirrhotic human liver tissue infected with hepatitis C.

(Credit: University of Leeds)

Now, computer scientists and medical researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom say they've devised a novel workaround in the form of a digital scanning system that produces 3D views of tissue samples with almost no extra labor.

Read more.

Source: CNET (by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore)

Hoersholm, Denmark - April 23, 2012 -- Visiopharm A/S, a global leader in Quantitative Digital Pathology, announced today that the United States patent and Trademark office will issue the patent “Feature-based registration of sectional images” (Application No. 12/514,918).

The patented technology, which is now protected in both Europe and in the United States, enables perfect alignment of whole slide images at any magnification, independently of tissue type and staining. This is a central capability for the next generation of quantitative bio-marker analysis, and for time- and cost efficient Whole Slide stereology

Next generation of quantitative bio-marker analysis: High-precision alignment of digital slides has direct application for automating the analysis of biomarkers. The rate limiting step for the application of Quantitative Digital pathology in research and diagnostics has been robust and reliable tumor identification and classification. With this technology, it is now possible to implement automated Virtual Double Staining. This is done by aligning two serial sections stained for different markers by immunohistochemistry; any nuclear, membrane, or cytoplasmic biomarker of interest may be stained for in each of the slides. Advanced analysis software is used for automated alignment of slides; the tumor cells are found in one slide, e.g., by means of a cytoplasmic marker, and the expression of the bio-marker of interest, such as Estrogen receptor or Ki67, is quantified in the other slide, within the cells identified with the cytoplasmic marker.

“With the Virtual double staining approach, we can use standardized and optimized staining protocols for both of the markers used without the difficulties that we experience with physical double staining due to, e.g., conflicting protocol requirements and overlapping chromogenes. This could be an important step towards deploying automated and standardized image analysis in clinical pathology. We are currently involved in a number of collaborative studies where this technology is applied and refined for different markers, different reagent vendors, different scanners, and different tumor types. We are basing the development of these methods on our standardized and optimized staining protocols, and expect to publish some of this work later in 2012”, stated Professor Mogens Vyberg, Director of NordiQC.

The technology is fully integrated as part of Visiopharm image analysis and stereology solutions. 

“This patent is very important to Visiopharm. We strongly believe this will become central to improve quality and automation, while at the same time reducing the costs associated with tissue based diagnostics and research. The results we are obtaining with our collaborators are very encouraging in terms of developing fully automated diagnostic tests and validating the value of this approach.”, adds Michael Grunkin, CEO of Visiopharm.

Time- and cost efficient Stereology: For the vast majority of scientific applications, highly automated Whole Slide Stereology can now replace Classical labor-intensive, manual, and high-maintenance complex hardware configurations for microscope-based stereology systems. The ability to automatically align Whole Slide Images of serial sections for an entire study is essential to automating the physical disector, and the sampling of perfectly aligned disector pairs. The technology is implemented in the Autodisector™, which is making Whole Slide Stereology a time- and cost-efficient option also in high-throughput environments.

According to Johnnie B. Andersen, Honorary Associate Professor at the Stereological Research Lab, and Stereology expert at Visiopharm, “Apart from automation, Whole Slide Stereology has demonstrated numerous significant advantages to researchers. Based on thin sections, the classical problems with lack of staining penetration in thick tissue sections are completely eliminated. Working with thin sections also eliminates practical problems that frequently originate from shrinkage and collapse of thick sections. Eliminating these critical issues will save researchers countless hours of futile lab work, when preparing tissue sections for important scientific studies. Loss of critical study data for those reasons can be very expensive. Finally, the combination of slide scanning and Whole Slide Stereology makes stereological data fully traceable, which is mission-critical in highly regulated environments”.

About Visiopharm

Over the past 10 years, Visiopharm image analysis and stereology software has become the preferred Quantitative Digital Pathology solution for leading biopharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, and academic researchers all over the world. Visiopharm has more than 300 deployed systems worldwide and a large network of distribution and support partners, and is featured in over 400 scientific publications.

Source: Visiopharm