Digital pathology is playing a crucial role in clinical pathology research & routine practices. It focuses on managing information gathered from the digitized slides, allows digital image sharing across locations for education, research, & diagnosis, and helps obtain detailed & quantitative analysis of tissues using features like viewing from different angles or zooming in or out.
Across educational institutes, digital pathology has contributed substantially to revolutionizing the educational sector in several ways. The sector is amongst the early adopters of digital pathology technology to employ an extensive spectrum of histopathological learning to educate undergraduate & postgraduate students with Continuous Professional Development (CPD) & External Quality Assurance (EQA).
A recent research report has cited around 14% CAGR for the Global Digital Pathology Market during 2022-27. These solutions have helped overcome several educational challenges, which were there with traditional methods using microscopes & glass slides. Some of these aspects include the following:
As we are transiting from the physical world to a digital environment, especially for histopathology, education with digital pathology is introducing an extensive range of benefits. It allows users to view a slide from multiple angles and zoom it in or out for better visualization. Users can also align images simultaneously for better comparison between different tissues.
Besides, several educational institutes can annotate diverse areas of interest using digital pathology & dig in further for deeper analysis of the cellular & sub-cellular tissue levels, which was not possible in conventional pathological practices. With advanced digital pathology software for education, users can acquire tutorials & questions with contextual information & references.
Digital Pathology allows every student to see & observe the same content, providing them the same learning experience with quality education. Digital pathology also helps address rare & complex course materials by only requiring one digital copy of the slide for standard class size.
With the help of Digital Pathology, users can attain better access to tissues & slides outside the laboratory & these systems offer digital access to courses using the internet & a standard web browser on a personal computer, smartphone, tablet, others.
It allows users to view slides from anywhere at any time. Besides, these systems support CPD & EQA schemes that help reduce extra laboratory cost & circulation turnaround time as the slides do not need to be shipped physically across locations but through online data transmission modes.
Takeaway
Transformation in healthcare with the advent of Digital Pathology is enabling such technologies to address several problems faced by laboratories. Hence, Digital Pathology is swiftly shaping the prospect of healthcare in different ways. With a plethora of advantages, there has to have some reluctance in the acceptance across laboratories. However, despite its slow adoption in many institutes, digital pathology is dramatically replacing traditional modes of analyzing data on glass slides on the microscope.
Besides, advantages like flexibility, accuracy, quicker results, and a potential to deliver ever-improving informatics & image analysis tools are anticipated to make digital pathology an attractive option in the coming years, thereby boosting its adoption across different regions.
Nonetheless, with the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, digital pathology has observed a spike across different research & healthcare institutions to attain quicker & accurate results, enabling pathologists to efficiently manage workload and diagnose samples while remotely working & ensuring safety from the virus.
