PathEd: An Online Digital Pathology Annotation and Teaching Tool to Further Pathology Education and Training
Melissa Castine ; University of Pittsburgh;
Content:
PathEd is an online application developed by the Integrated Medical Information Technologies System (IMITS) Telepathology Project in order to augment pathology education in the Air Force and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center health systems. Typically, pathology education consists of slide sets in a given domain that are accessible to students that require them to review the slides and the given diagnosis. Many times there is little to no additional case information given for a slide.
Technology:
PathEd provides complete case information and allows pathologists to annotate the digital images with any pertinent diagnostic and/or prognostic findings that may aid the pathology student in understanding why a case was given a particular diagnosis.
Design:
Since PathEd is easily accessible via the internet, care was taken during the applications development to ensure an extremely user friendly design. The application uses simple drop down menus that allow for quick and simple navigation through the system. Case input requires the user to fill out simple forms with any available case information. PathEd organizes cases according to the user-defined organ, category, subcategory classifications, and presents the cases in a tree structure through which the user can navigate to find relevant cases. Additionally, PathEd allows for several search options, including a keyword and classification searches.
Results:
Currently, PathEd has over 100 de-identified cases that have been entered into the general repository of cases, which can be utilized for educational purposes. These cases are richly annotated to further pathology education and training for residents, fellows and medical students. Potentially, similarly annotated digital slides can be created for training other allied health professionals such as cytotechnologists and pathology assistants.
Conclusion:
PathEd is an easily web-accessible Pathology education software application that allows users to input complete case information, append digital slides to the cases, and provide necessary annotations to those cases. This accessibility and added case information gives PathEd an advantage over traditional slide set study; thus, PathEd has great potential to further pathology education due to its accessibility over the internet, ease of use, and detailed case information.
