Digital pathology: Sharpening the edge of disease detection

[00:00:03] Pathology is, I would say, is the centre of the medicine. Most of the diagnosis and even more important, most of the treatment plans for the patient go through pathology. My work involves the diagnosis, the understanding all the diseases by studying the cells, only cells. I love pathology in all senses. I would say every day more. We are living an exciting moment in pathology. I think Pamplona is a very nice city, a mix of old and modernity. When I have time, I like to walk to the centre of the city. Plaza del Castillo is the real heart, with plenty of people, but it's quiet, it's nice, it has history and it's relaxing. My name is Dr Lozano, but everybody calls me Lola. I'm a pathologist specialising in cytopathology and lung pathology. I'm the Director of Pathology here at the University of Navarra in Pamplona. Everything that helps us to make a better diagnosis will improve the healthcare system. With digital pathology, we can be more accurate, more precise, and can give some information, extra information to our clinician. And digital tools are very important for that. My name is Michael Rivers. -Dr Lozano. Hello. -Hi. I lead the Digital Pathology programme at Roche. Today I'm in Pamplona to meet with Dr Lozano, who is an early adopter of digital pathology technology, and really to see the impact of that in her lab. Wonderful. -Ah, this is where the team is. -Yeah. Pathology is going through a fundamental transformation. It has been historically a very manual and analogue workflow and now it's moving to something that is much more automated and fully digitised. This is a tremendous transformation that has incredible benefits for patients. Patients should expect to get their diagnostic results faster... Do you think we can make a consultation with your friend in Madrid? to ultimately get better and more complete information that will really have an impact on their outcomes. Before having digital pathology, we have to send, physically send the samples for consultation. That means that some cases can even be lost or can be damaged. When the sample comes to the department, the technician puts a sticker on it to identify the samples. Then the samples go to the grossing. The resident or the pathologist manipulates the samples in order to make a paraffin block. The samples get fixed in formalin. The next day, the technicians make this block and cut this block with the microtome. They make very thin sections. Then the sections go to the automatic stainer. And now with the digital from the stainer, they go directly to digitalisation. In our experience, digital pathology increases the pathology's productivity. We save time. Driving digital innovation, particularly in pathology, brings significant benefits. Patient samples can now be shared with experts anywhere in the world breaking down geographical barriers. With the use of digital pathology we can share cases with more expert pathologists to be more accurate and to ask in some cases, especially in difficult cases, for help. I believe the future of pathology is speed, accuracy, global collaboration for patients enabled by AI image analysis tools. One important thing also with digital pathology is the possibility to apply digital algorithms that help us to give more specific information that doesn't rely anymore on the subjectivity of our eyes on the microscope. So it relies on well-established algorithms that help us to give the clinician more exact information. It was impossible before. My hope for digital pathology probably in the future it would help us to predict something that our eye is unable to detect.