Presented at the 2000 APIII Conference Return to 2000 Abstract Index
TELEPATHOLOGY AT NO COST
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Birmingham, Alabama
Sate Hamza, MD
Sate Hamza, MD; Kristopher N. Jones, BS; Peter Anderson,
DVM, PhD
Telepathology is, in simple terms, the remote interpretation of digital macroscopic and microscopic images. This remote digital communication involves three phases:
- at one end a digital image is captured,
- the image is sent via a telecommunications link to the receiving end,
- and the images are displayed and interpreted.
Though
professional telepathology systems are still complicated
and expensive endeavors, tremendous advances in information
technology and the explosive growth of the Internet make
it feasible for anyone to fairly represent and share a pathology
case remotely at no cost and without needing special technical
expertise.
At the capture end of the process, many pathologists are
employing high-quality consumer cameras to acquire digital
still images of gross specimens and of microscopic sections.
These digital image-capturing devices are of sufficient
quality as to allow acquisition of high-resolution images.
The cameras are easy to use and require little if any training.
In most instances, the captured digital images require no
editing. If needed, however, editing can be very easily
performed using a simple image editing application bundled
with most digital cameras, preinstalled on new computers,
or available for little or no cost on the Internet. Beyond
simply cropping images, image editors are useful for inserting
labels and text on the image or adding an inset on the image
to show the exact location on the microscopic slide where
the image was captured.
The captured digital images can then be shared using the Internet. Many free image-sharing websites are available and are easy to use. They provide a simple way to share images without the need of expertise to create or edit Web pages. The telepathology link is completed when colleagues using any computer and Web browser review these images.
With the same resources that laymen use to capture and share their family pictures, a pathologist can represent a pathology case digitally to be viewed by a colleague remotely. In a few preliminary experiments, the opinions rendered by pathologists looking at the digital version of a case were very similar (if not identical) to those rendered by pathologists who examined the glass slides. The ubiquitous Internet and its tools can be used by a pathologist to share a case at no cost and without the need for a special telepathology setup.
