Here's an interesting paper by Michael Montalto of GE's new Omnyx startup: Pathology re-imagined (the history of digital radiology and the future of anatomic pathology).
The analogies between digital pathology and digital radiology are extensive, as Michael discusses. Digital pathology images are larger - on average, perhaps two orders of magnitude - which imposes extra performance demands on computers and networks, but fortunately Moore's Law is helping as the cost of storage, processors, and network bandwidth continue to drop.
In my opinion a key point of this article is this one:
"Although great progress has been made on scanners, storage, and browsers, there are critical missing pieces that are needed to capture true value; namely, an infrastructure whose mission is to capture efficiency in the overall pathology workflow."
We see this the same way, and Aperio's Spectrum system is designed to provide exactly that infrastructure.
One final point; I think Michael misses one of the key value propositions of digital pathology; the capability of automated image analysis to speed examination on digital slides and improve accuracy of diagnosis. Just like Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) is making Radiologists more efficient and accurate, image analysis in digital pathology is doing so for Pathologists.