Digital pathology imaging - The next frontier in medical imaging

Pathologists have practiced medicine relatively unchanged over the last century to render diagnosis of disease. However, over the last decade, the practice of Pathology is undergoing a foundational change. In addition to the revolutions in diagnostic biomarkers, we are seeing a ground-swell in new imaging technologies. This new image based technology offers significant opportunities to the practice. However, it comes at a cost - there are technology, regulatory, and methodological challenges which may derail the adoption process if not addressed proactively and innovatively. Pathology lags behind other medicine practice such as Radiology in the adoption of digital workflow. Recently, significant advances have been made in the capture and management of the whole slide images used in pathology practice and this is leading to an explosion in the data volume that completely eclipses the vast quantities of data being produced in Radiology. Another area of technology challenges is related to the analysis of the imagery data for detection, identification, recognition and quantification of the pathology in the slide. This clearly is the bleeding edge of digital pathology which will enable the creation of a paradigm shift in the practice of medicine. This paper explores the technological challenges emerging in different areas of digital pathology. We present image capture technologies, the image analysis techniques, and the key computational challenges.