Digital pathology

Digital pathology is a branch of pathology concerned with handling and interpreting data from digitized tissue slides. It relies on computer-based systems and virtual microscopy to display, organize, share, and examine these digital slides on screens. Its uses include diagnostic medicine, and it seeks to make diagnoses, prognoses, and disease predictions more efficient and cost-effective by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare.

The field began with telepathology experiments in the 1960s. Virtual microscopy as a concept emerged in the 1990s across several life science disciplines. Around the year 2000, the scientific community broadly adopted the term "digital pathology" to describe these digitization efforts. At that time, however, technical limitations—such as scanners, storage, and network capacity—restricted widespread use.

This changed as more powerful, affordable scanners and mass or cloud storage became available. Radiology underwent its own digital shift nearly 15 years earlier, not because it is more advanced, but due to fundamental differences in imaging. In radiology, the image source is the living patient, and images are usually captured digitally from the start. In pathology, scanning is done from preserved, processed specimens, or even from archived slides in a biobank for retrospective studies.

Beyond these differences in pre-analytics and metadata, digital pathology requires two to three orders of magnitude more storage than radiology. Still, the expected benefits mirror those of radiology: the ability to transmit digital slides quickly over distances, enabling telepathology; easier access to past specimens from the same patient or similar cases for comparison, without retrieving physical slides; the ability to view different areas of multiple slides side-by-side using a virtual microscope; and the ability to annotate slides directly and share those annotations for teaching and research.

Currently, digital pathology is mainly used for education, telepathology, teleconsultation, and research. It allows sharing and annotating slides, as well as downloading annotated lecture sets for e-learning. Its use in diagnostics is still emerging.

Digital slides are created from glass slides using specialized scanners. High-quality scans must be free of dust, scratches, and other obstructions.