The Daily Scan

Aperio Awarded Patent for High Performance Viewing of Digital Slides

Please forgive a little horn-blowing, but I have to note this press release with pride: Aperio Awarded Patent for High Performance Viewing of Digital Slides:

Aperio Technologies, Inc., (Aperio), a global leader in digital pathology for the healthcare and life sciences industry, announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company patent No. 7,738,688 entitled, “System and Method for Viewing Virtual Slides.”

The field of digital pathology is enabled by converting glass microscope slides into digital whole- slide images that can be viewed, managed, and analyzed. A key feature of any digital pathology system is the ability to view digital slides remotely, across local and wide area networks. The ‘688 patent describes novel techniques for processing and displaying digital slide images stored on a server, which facilitate rapid viewing of digital slides. This technology also enables real-time panning and continuous and rapid zooming of very large digital slide images without loss of image fidelity, as well as simultaneous collaborative viewing of digital slides and associated data.

Viewing digital slides across a network is of course a basic capability of digital pathology, at the core of many of the value propositions for the technology, and we've worked long and hard on the underlying software to make our viewing experience as fast and seamless as possible.  It is great to add this patent on our techniques to Aperio's portfolio...

CAP Leaders Stress Need for Oversight of Direct-to-Consumer Tests

In a press release, the College of American Pathologists have Stressed Need for Oversight of Direct-to-Consumer and Laboratory Developed Tests:

With the increasing importance of laboratory tests in diagnosing and treating disease, representatives of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) today presented recommendations to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urging increased oversight of laboratory developed tests (LDTs) and "direct-to-consumer" tests. Most genetic tests fall into one or both of these testing categories.

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Since the implementation of the 1976 Medical Device Amendments, the FDA has generally not used its oversight authority to enforce applicable regulations with respect to LDTs.  The FDA convened today's meeting to hear testimony about key issues that it will consider as it develops new regulations that would apply risk-based oversight of LDTs.

Interesting, and this comes in the same timeframe in which the FDA are looking into regulating genetic testing as well.

FDA Wants To Regulate Genetic Testing

Randall Parker's FuturePundit is a great blog, and he recently posted that the FDA Wants To Regulate Genetic Testing:

The FDA wants to get more involved in controlling the genetic testing industry.

In a prelude to overhauling its regulatory oversight of genetic diagnostic testing, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will convene a public meeting next week to gather input from test makers and others.

The event reflects a turning point in genetic testing, a cornerstone of personalized medicine. Once mainly the domain of rare diseases, scientists have discovered a growing number of genetic variations linked to both the risk of more common disease and patients' response to drugs. The number of genetic diagnostic tests has expanded rapidly, and tests have become increasingly complex, making it more challenging to interpret and act on the results.

Randall notes: "I would prefer the FDA and like regulatory agencies stay out of genetic testing except perhaps to test for error rates and publish the results. The rate of innovation will be faster with less regulatory involvement."

What do you think?  Please post a comment...

The Cell Counting Cryptogram Challenge

Genetic Engineering and Biotech News has posted an interesting challenge on their website; the contest is based on Cell Counting.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to "decode the cipher hidden in this image".  In case you get stuck, they are going to post weekly clues...  quite interesting, and good luck!

Digital Pathology in Education

When Aperio thinks of the markets for digital pathology, we divide everything into two broad catagories, Healthcare and Life Science.  The market for digital pathology in Education is large and important, and somewhat cuts across these catagories; for pathologists everywhere their entire careers are education, starting with formal schooling but extending onward forever into the future, always more to learn, new techniques, new insights.  And digital pathology certainly helps to share more information more broadly, more efficiently, and more inexpensively.

Consultant Amanda Lowe has posted a nice overview: Digital Pathology in Education, which links a nice CAP presentation by Lewis Hassell and David Frishberg, The Exciting and Expanding Role of Digital Pathology in Pathology Education.  The presentation includes diagrams, audio clips, and a lot of great information, and I definitely encourage you to view it.

Sloan Kettering opens $100M image-guided treatment center

HealthImaging notes Sloan Kettering opens $100M image-guided treatment center:

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City has opened a new $100 million, 40,000-square-foot Center for Image-Guided Intervention (CIGI) for cancer treatments, a new endoscopy suite and expanded its Surgical Day Hospital last month.

CIGI has six procedure rooms offering interventional radiology technology, including fluoroscopy, ultrasound, PET, MRI, CT and two additional angio-CT units.  Approximately 120 patients a day are expected to be seen in the facility, according to the provider.

They don't mention digital pathology but one would expect they will take a lot of core biopsies at this center, and could benefit from remote sufficiency interpretations...

Pathology Groups Prepare to Deliver Results to Smart Phones

The Dark Daily reports Pathology Groups and Clinical Labs Prepare to Deliver Test Results to Smart Phones:

With the advent of data-capable smart phones, disease management is taking a giant step forward. That has important implications for pathologists and clinical laboratory manager, who need to ensure that their medical laboratory information systems are ready for access by smart phones and other wireless devices used by clinicians.

The question I find myself asking is why.  Clearly "everyone" now carries a smartphone, whether iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, or whatever... and the technology to make results avaialble on them now exists.  But what is the use case?  Do oncologists and other clinicians need pathology reports delivered in realtime?  Please comment if you have a view on this...

Pathologists as Clinicians

Bruce Friedman makes a great post on Training Pathologists to be better clinicians.

Although I use the term clinician frequently in this blog, I discovered that I had some difficulty finding a definition for it that satisfied me. I finally hit on the following definition for clinical, which can also be used to define clinician: Pertaining to [the direct] observation and treatment of patients. In the light of this as well as my previous inclinations, I will resist the temptation to classify pathologists and radiologists as clinicians but rather classify them as diagnosticians who act as consultants to clinicians. It is these latter physicians who provide the direct care to patients.

The subject of Pathologists as doctors who treat patients comes up a lot in the hallways at Aperio.  There is a point of view that Pathologists are a sort of lab instrument; you ask them to perform a test, and they deliver the result, and that's it.  We reject this point of view.  There is an essentially subjective and emotional aspect to pathology, there is a human patient, a back story, treatment options, etc. which all must be considered, there is far more than simply using experience and pattern recognition to identify disease upon inspection of specimens.

Viewed from this perspective, digital pathology is a technology which helps pathologists to be doctors who treat patients.  And helping them to do so is most satisfying...