Digital Pathology: Revolutionizing the Field and its Remarkable Advancements

In general, the practice of medicine including pathology is undergoing a digital transformation and digital pathology is emerging as a potential new standard of care. For most diseases, especially tumor diseases, pathological diagnosis is called the “gold standard” of clinical medical diagnosis. For example, if a patient has a tumor, whether the tumor is benign or malignant and whether he has cancer can be initially diagnosed through B-ultrasound, CT, MRI and other imaging examinations, but the final diagnosis still depends on the pathology slides, which are the ultimate basis for doctors to judge the nature of the disease, greatly affect the treatment methods, medications, and prognosis of patients. The level of pathological diagnosis determines the misdiagnosis rate and missed diagnosis rate to a large extent, especially for cancer patients, which is usually a part of life and death. As the most reliable primary diagnosis in medicine, when the pathology report is inconclusive, it often leads to either over-treatment or under-treatment.

Compared with the traditional pathology system, the digital pathology system can solve a series of problems in a targeted manner. For example, using the digital pathology slide library, precious pathology slide data can be permanently preserved, which solves the problems of difficult storage, easy fading, easy damage, easy loss and slide retrieval of glass slides, etc. When the doctor is reading the slide, he can browse any area of the digital slide at different magnifications anytime, anywhere. The whole digital slide can be viewed on the display at one time, and different areas can be zoomed in or out to achieve high-precision diagnosis. At the same time, the digital pathology system also supports side-by-side display of multiple slide images for comparison and analysis, and can also be easily shared with other doctors. This greatly facilitates consultation and telemedicine, and also brings convenience to the development of online slides reading webinars and online live teaching, which is beneficial to train more pathology talents.