Technology allows fast diagnoses
Dr. Anil Parwani stood at a monitor, reviewing the pink and purple blotches — a magnified image of a patient’s lymph-node biopsy.
The new technology at the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State University
allows physicians to scan the sliver from a glass microscope slide and transform it into a digital image.
That technological shift is a game changer for the pathologists who form diagnoses from biopsies, Parwani said. It means that these diagnoses are delivered faster and more accurately.
“I’m not limited to my microscope,” he said. “My slides could be in another building, in another country, and I could review the slides wherever I want to. I’ve actually looked at slides while crossing the Atlantic Ocean, on my laptop.”
The technology already has been used to speed up consultations, get quicker second opinions and for medical education. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it for diagnostic use in April.
The system also is being used in the OhioHealth system, said Marci Dop, system vice president of lab and support services. She said images can be shared among doctors much more easily and quickly than slides, which have to be packaged and shipped for consults or second opinions.
“This is pretty exciting,” Dop said. “For pathologists who are dependent on a slide getting to them not broken, not lost, in a timely manner, that’s pretty significant.”
Digital images also can be studied in ways that glass slides cannot, Parwani said. Pinpoint measurements can be taken, cell divisions can be counted and patterns from multiple slides can be discovered.
“It makes pathology more standardized, more uniform and more objective,” said Parwani, who serves as director of digital pathology and vice chair/director of anatomic pathology at OSU’s College of Medicine Department of Pathology.
On Wednesday, lab technicians at the James scanned hundreds of slides to create digital images for dozens of patients.
The slides were placed in slotted columns inside a large, boxy machine. As the machine whirred, it placed the slides one by one under a scanner that makes digital images. It takes about 2 minutes per slide.
The technology allows clinicians to get images in front of experts around the world, said Dr. Michael Riben, medical director of pathology and laboratory informatics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and a spokesman for the American Society for Clinical Pathology.
“Patients will have access to experts in fields they might not have had before in a timely manner they couldn’t have gotten before,” Riben said.
He also said that digital images can be seen by many people simultaneously. With FDA approval, he expects more hospitals will invest in the technology to see workflow and, possibly, financial gains.
At Ohio State, Parwani said plans are to create study sets of slides that can be used for teaching and a “digital museum” of rare and unusual cancers that can be used by clinicians and researchers.
Parwani said he expects limitless applications with the use of computer algorithms that will allow pathologists to look at specific features in a disease.
“The biggest and the most powerful use of this technology is yet to come,” he said.