As the first hospital system in the United States to use digital pathology for primary diagnosis, our team has been at the forefront of this ever-evolving field providing real-time diagnoses and analyses to our patients and physicians.
Since 2017, when the OSUCCC – James and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center opened the Digital Pathology Scan Center, we’ve worked diligently to amass one of the world’s largest collections of whole-slide images, which is helping us transform the way health care is delivered and improve the lives of our patients.
What is digital pathology?
Digital pathology is the management of data and information generated by digitizing specimen slides of blood, tissue and other biological samples.
In action, it’s converting glass slides into high-resolution digital images that can be sent anywhere in the world to be accessed and analyzed with a few clicks of a computer keyboard and mouse. They can even be viewed on a mobile phone, allowing providers anywhere to offer input on a patient’s care.
Thanks to many advancements in this scientific field over the past two decades, the process of digitizing a glass slide — where the specimen is placed and stained so it can be looked at under a microscope — takes only a few minutes. People can now receive diagnoses more rapidly and accurately than ever before, regardless of where they are.
Today, the transfer of most pathology information from one health care provider to another is digital at the OSUCCC – James.
Benefits of digital pathology
Digital pathology at the OSUCCC – James provides many benefits to its patients, the health care providers who work here and the larger hospital system.
The ease and efficiency in which medical information can be shared with the doctors and nurses who need it has tremendous positive impacts. Benefits include:
- Erasing distance between health care providers
- Accelerating diagnosis time
- Making consultations easier
- Enabling new ways to examine specimens
- Creating efficient processes
- Bolstering educational and research capabilities
- Enhancing revenue with these time-saving and efficiency-driving measures
Transforming cancer detection and diagnosis at the Digital Pathology Scan Center
As home to one of the world’s largest digital and computational programs with a collection of whole-slide images that is unmatched by most other hospital systems, our pathologists are instantly able to share their knowledge to help patients across the state and around the globe. We can provide pathology review in real time to physicians hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
We are also a proud leader in deploying quantitative image analysis (QIA) learning and artificial intelligence to produce these dramatically faster diagnoses as we work with partners to develop, test and implement tools that are transforming digital pathology.
Our digital pathology program also expands research capabilities to explore disease consequences and treatments in ways never before possible. Digital images allow our researchers to assemble cohorts more rapidly, inquire about larger volumes of cases and explore specimens more deeply, quickly and accurately.
Here are some statistics on how Ohio State’s digital pathology program is changing cancer and disease diagnosis:
- Roughly 2,400 slides are digitized here daily
- Nearly 3 million whole-slide images have been created since 2017
- Slides in our collection represent more than 300,000 patients and nearly every type of tissue and disease
- Technicians can convert 120 glass slides into digital images in less than two minutes
- Slides can be magnified up to 40 times
- Digitized samples date back to 2011