"Preparing your lab’s automation infrastructure for the inclusion of digital pathology and AI" Article Featured in Medical Laboratory Observer 2024
Featured in Medical Laboratory Observer - MLO
Written By Lisa-Jean Clifford
Incorporating digital pathology and AI solutions and workflows into your organization is an exciting opportunity to enhance your operational efficiency, positively impact your diagnostic accuracy, and increase the overall automation of your laboratory practice. It is essential for maintaining your competitive position in the industry with adoption of leading technology occurring at an ever-increasing rate. It is also important to understand your current technology infrastructure and workflows and to work closely with your digital pathology solution provider to ensure that you are taking full advantage of the benefits of deploying these technologies —both today and setting the foundation for further adoption of new technologies into the future.
Things to consider
1. Understand your initial goals and your long-term goals. These two may be the same or very different, depending upon your adoption strategy and reasons. The most common goals for digital pathology solution adoption in the clinical setting today are:
- Reduce the need for transportation of glass between labs
- Access to geographically distributed facilities and pathologists
- The ability to recruit and retain pathologists
- Support the technical component (TC), professional component (PC), and global workflows for outreach clients
- Instant access to consultations for subspecialties and/or complex cases
- Tumor boards
- The ability to use artificial intelligence
When considering the above, you may have one or more initial reasons or objectives in adoption with the understanding that you would like to achieve more of these goals, or additional ones, moving forward.
2. The implementation of digital pathology needs to be an organizational goal and not just one of the lab’s. The process starts with the technical side of the workflow — from the understanding of what the scanner(s) you choose to deploy require for ‘clean’ slides. This is something that can have a significant impact on the usability, speed, and value of digital. You must start with proper identification of your lab process for creating slides and know that things like misaligned slipcovers, smudges, fingerprints, substances on the glass, folds in tissue, bubbles, and other artifacts are going to cause scanned images (WSI’s) to be unusable. This will create inefficiencies and increased time by having to redo and rescan slides in order to get usable images to the pathologists. This is the first step in quality in, quality out....Read More







