Digital pathology system
Sectra’s solution for storing, viewing and sharing digital pathology images has received the CE mark for primary diagnostic use. The system enables more efficient cancer care by enhancing collaboration and sharing of images between pathologists and radiologists. Pathologists will now be able to review cases digitally on a computer screen, enabling them to eliminate the microscope. The digital format brings new tools to the pathologists’ fingertips and also allows samples to be sent easily to other pathologists to share the workload or for specialist consultations, thereby facilitating quicker and more accurate diagnosis. Pathology and radiology are at the centre of cancer diagnosis and their collective findings are the basis for patient treatment and its outcome. Both disciplines are highly dependent on adequate clinical information in order to provide accurate and useful reports for the clinician, surgeon, oncologist or patient. Despite their joint responsibility for cancer diagnosis, the exchange of information between the two groups is often very limited as the radiology and pathology workflows are usually completely different. Sectra’s system for digital pathology is built on the same platform as its radiology PACS for managing radiology images. The common technical platform enables closer collaboration between the two specialties, sometimes referred to as integrated diagnostics, facilitating, for example, more efficient multi-disciplinary team meetings. Focusing on end-user experience and workflow efficiency, the system provides a platform where images from different hardware vendors can be viewed and archived, and where histology or cytology images can be shown together with macro images. Furthermore, it allows full case overview including integration with other image systems, enabling access to radiology or dermatology data and images in the same workstation. Sectra digital pathology workstation, IDS7/px, consists of a dedicated image window for pathology images and the regular IDS7 information window. The information window includes worklists, full patient information, with possibility to access images from other specialties such as mammography, radiology and dermatology and a reporting window with support for speech recognition. The possibility to reach different types of images, such as pathology and radiology from the same workstation is especially useful for multidisciplinary teams (MDT) meetings. The image window supports the pathologist during review, preparation of MDTs and education and it contains for example tools for text annotations, distance and area measurements. Images from the same block are registered as such and if similar enough are automatically synchronized by the software enabling efficient comparison of the same structure stained with different techniques.
