Bioscience Technology: Digitizing Pathology

Bioscience Technology ran a nice survey article on Digitizing Pathology.

Fundamentally digital pathology is the digitization of microscope slides into image files called “digital slides”—the histologic equivalent of computerized x-rays.  Yet according to Aperio CEO Dirk Soenksen, digitization is just the beginning.  Digital pathology, Soenksen says, “is much more focused on the management of information than on the scanning technology for creating the digital slide.”  Computer files can be analyzed, shared, archived, and compared in ways physical slides cannot.

At least 30 commercial systems exist, according to one 2006 study.  Available from such firms as Aperio and BioImagene, MetaSystems, and Genetix, most are essentially automated brightfield microscopes in a box, though some, such as 3DHISTECH’s Pannoramic 250 and Genetix’s Ariol, handle fluorescent slides, too.

Whatever the platform, users invariably can view the resulting slides remotely (an application called “telepathology”), typically via a browser-based client often compared to Google Earth (that is, the software sends a low-magnification image that the user can quickly navigate and magnify).  As a result, whether they work on a different floor in the same hospital or thousands of miles away, pathologists can make diagnoses and consultations as if in front of a microscope, all without endangering the glass slides themselves.

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the technology and companies in the digital pathology market already, but this article gives a nice comprehensive overview.  It is great to see the market awareness of this technology expanding.