Greetings blog public: Last week Aperio attended the USCAP Conference in Washington DC en masse, with a huge 30’ x 50’ exhibit booth, a good number of our crack marketing and sales staff, and a solid representation of our senior team.
A highlight of this show – which was attended by over 4,500 pathologists, of whom nearly 40% came from outside the U.S. – was the presentation of a Distinguished Pathologist Award to Dr. Juan Rosai, who flew out from Milan, Italy to receive it. The ceremony featured some nice remarks by Dr. Victor Reuter, Dr. Rosai’s onetime student, about the special tradition in pathology of teaching and the role seminars have played in educating pathologists. Dr. Rosai is the world’s foremost expert in surgical pathology, and he is known for the incredible collection of slides he has amassed, going back to Dr. Lauren Ackerman, who was Dr. Rosai’s teacher. Aperio is working with Dr. Rosai and USCAP to digitize this entire collection – including all the supporting case details and seminar notes – and to publish it online, free to all pathologists as an incredible decision support reference.
For this show, Aperio worked with USCAP to publish a “sneak preview” of the Rosai Collection on SecondSlide.com, and made the collection available in the Aperio booth.
The Aperio booth featured stations for brightfield and fluorescence scanning, Spectrum, and image analysis, in addition to the featured Rosai Collection area. We also showed a “case of the day” and hosted an ongoing challenge for pathologists to score ER and PR slides. Oh, and did I mention we had two meeting rooms in the booth? And numerous spiffy Barco high-resolution monitors? And a large touchscreen display? And a four-panel “wall of images” continuously displaying ScanScope slides? I’m probably leaving things out, too :)
Our booth was amazingly busy all week. I think it was the most traffic I’ve ever seen through an Aperio booth, ever.
USCAP is a research-oriented conference, and nearly 2,000 posters were submitted. Each year we scan the abstracts to find references to digital pathology; this year 18 mentioned Aperio. That’s leadership! Which Aperio Product Manager Chrystal Adams proudly showed off with a nice poster in the booth…
Among all the great things that happened, the coolest moment of the show (for me at least) was when Dr. Juan Rosai paid a visit to our booth. Several Aperions were showing the Rosai Collection to an interested group of visitors when who should appear but Dr. Rosai himself, and [of course] he immediately offered some comments on a case from 1945 which was being displayed :) An amazing moment in an otherwise amazing show.
Aperio Product Manager Karen Gustashaw with newly elected Digital Pathology Association Executive Director Mike Miller. Among other things, the DPA will be
running the 2010 Pathology Visions conference.
The new Aperio ScanScope FL flourescence scanner was on display and scanning away. A lot of vendors chose the USCAP show to introduce new whole-slide imaging scanners or digital pathology software capabilities. It is remarkable the extent to which digital pathology has become an accepted technology over such a short time.
Last but not least, here's a picture of me (Ole Eichhorn, Aperio's Chief Technology Officer), with Dr. Savitri Krishnamurthy of M.D. Anderson and Aperio's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jared Schwartz.
It was a great conference and I enjoyed every minute of a long week.






