Just made time to go through all my notes from the Pathology Visions conference, held September 13-15. As usual it was a jumbled mess :) Anyway here are some blogworthy summaries … and pictures.
The conference was amazingly well organized, as usual; kudos to the whole organizing team. I heard any number of people comment on the quality of the conference, and especially the presenters and their material.
The proceedings are now posted
The conference was also amazingly well attended, there were over 300 attendees, net of the organizers and staff. That is fantastic. Clearly a conference on the rise within the field of Pathology.
A big change was that this year’s conference was sponsored by the newly formed Digital Pathology Association, a nonprofit industry group. The transition went very smoothly and the support for the concept of the DPA was high.
As last year, the reception in the exhibit area worked really well. It gives great “flow” to the exhibitors (of whom there were many more this year), and provides a nick kickoff to the conference.
Dr. Victor Reuter of Sloan Kettering gave a great keynote speech, on Technology in the Modern Surgical Pathology Laboratory.
Dirk Soenksen talked about the formation of the Digital Pathology Association, of which he is the first President, and introduced the gold sponsors. He talked about the various stages of adoption of the new technology, and what the DPA can do to foster adoption. Three of the other sponsors also gave brief talks: Richard Atkins, CEO of Sunquest, Gene Cartwright, CEO of Omnyx, and Mohan Utterwar, VP/Strategy of Bioimagene.
Dr. John Pfeifer and Mike Isaccs of Washington University gave a great talk, Digital Pathology: Value Added, Finally. The highlight for me was when Mike gave a *live* demo of Cerner Copath integration with Spectrum, including launching ImageScope from within Copath.
Dr. Eric Glassy of Pathology Inc. gave a nice talk on Digital Pathology in Community Practice (aka how to bring water to elephants :). Eric always combines a pragmatic approach (what works) with an optimistic attitude (what could make it better). Path Inc. are a physician group with a bunch of hospitals as customers who also run a reference lab, so they run the gamut.
Day one wrapped up as Keith Kaplan of Mayo moderated a panel on Digital Pathology in the Clinical Environment, featuring Dr. John Spinosa of Scripps, Dr. Bruce Friedman of University of Michigan, and Dr. Jared Schwartz of Presbyterian (current President of CAP). It was a great discussion about what will it take to get to full adoption of digital pathology. And interesting point was made that atudents are choosing medical schools based on their use of new technology, and residents are picking medical programs based on new technology. There was also discussion about the need to convert from batch to continuous processing for efficiency.
After the sessions on the first day there was a nice wine-and-cheese reception in the exhibit hall. It was really well attended, you felt like the conference was “bigger” than in previous years, probably because there were more exhibitors… and also quite a few nice posters.
A little later the DPA’s Industry Council held its inaugural meeting. This is a group comprising two delegates from each of the DPA’s sponsors. (Mark Wrenn and I represent Aperio.) Dirk Soenksen led the meeting in his capacity as President of the DPA; he gave an update on the DPA board meeting, talked about the Industry Council structure, and there was a good discussion about things that the council might tackle (and conversely, things it would not). The DPA Industry Council ended with a presentation about Digital Pathology in DICOM presented by me, on behalf on NEMA Working Group 26.
Tuesday began bright and early with a nice presentation by Dr. Peter Banks of Carolinas Medical Center, on Virtual Microscopy in the Classroom and Courtroom. He noted the ever-increasing use of virtual microscopy in CME, including by ASCP, and that USCAP and many specialty conferences use VM.
Dr. Ken Bloom of Clarient gave a wonderful presentation on the Virtual Consultative Network, describing how Clarient are using digital pathology with 2,000 slides every day, serving 700 clients. Ken says he uses “digital checkout” for 90% of his cases.
Dr. Filadelfio Venco of Diagnostika, in São Paulo Brazil, give a very interesting talk on the shift from hierarchical to web organization. He did talk about digital pathology and how it is being used by his reference lab to serve customers in Argentina, but it was not a run-of-the-mill digital pathology presentation, as it included a lot of philosophy. Pretty thought-provoking, he suggested that the web is more than technology, it is a different way of approaching workflow. Very interesting, check out the slides in the proceedings…
Dr. Savitri Krishnamurthy of MD Anderson presented: Digital Pathology, are we ready? She is the P.I. at MD Anderson for Project Pink, and presented the study and her preliminary results wrapped in a description of her department and processes.
After lunch Dr. Ossama Tawfik of University of Kansas explained What does a pap smear have to do with telepathology? A very interesting talk, in which he proposed replacing pap smears with cell blocks which are sectioned like histology, facilitating better reads and IHC testing. He showed a study in which 31 cases where analyzed with thinPrep pap smears and with cell blocks, and there were 11 ASCUS with the thinPrep (unknown significance) and just 2 with cell blocks.
Dr. David Weaver of On-Q-ity (fka DNAR) gave a technical presentation on Personalizing cancer therapy with biomarker networks. The coolest part for me was seeing the way they are using Aperio's Genie pattern recognition tool; note the montage image in his presentation at right. He talked about the difference in the way we treat infectious disease and the way we treat cancer; with an infectious disease, we treat by infection type, with a cancer, we [often] treat by body site.
The conference wrapped up (and so does this report!) with a panel discussion featuring all the DPA gold sponsors led by Dr. Jared Schwartz. There were some good suggestions for things which can be done by the DPA to educate the industry and foster adoption of digital pathology.
Oh well just one more thing, an ice cream social! (Yes, I do love ice cream, and yes, I did have two. Or was it three?) A great way to wrap up a golden conference!
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