Digital-Pathology-Today

Our guest is Sam Terese, president and CEO of Alverno Laboratories, an integrated laboratory delivery network serving multiple healthcare systems and hospitals in the Chicagoland and Indiana area. Sam Terese has more than 30 years of experience in the laboratory environment, including settings as varied as community hospitals, academic medical centers, as well as research based organizations. Alverno, under Sam's leadership, has pursued a strategy of growth and consolidation and offers laboratory medicine, anatomic pathology services, as well as molecular diagnostics. This episode, we're going to be talking about considerations in going digital. We will examine the advantages of digital pathology to a healthcare system, and the opportunities for improving efficiencies and consolidation. Alverno was an early adopter in taking its anatomic pathology services digital, so we will discuss what it means to be an early adopter. We will look at how digital pathology can enhance the care that pathologists provide to doctors, patients and healthcare systems. We'll discover some considerations in establishing a relationship in a digital pathology platform provider because clearly as we're going to learn, it's not a one-off transaction or a one-time thing, but an ongoing relationship or even a foundation upon which we can build.

Our guest is Mariano de Socarraz, president of CorePlus Servicos Clinicos y Patologicos. With over 25 years experience in anatomic pathology, CorePlus is an international specialty laboratory serving clients in the US and the Caribbean. This episode, we are talking about the digital journey that CorePlus underwent. We will discover what were the steps involved, once the decision was made to go digital, what lessons were learned and of course, what is the business case for going digital. The big news of course, is CorePlus made the first installation of an AI system for clinical use in the Americas. We will examine what the system is going to do, what are the use cases in practical applications and what are the gains and benefits we can expect.

Our guest is Dr. Cory Roberts, CEO, Chairman and President of ProPath. He is a pathologist with over 20 years of experience in healthcare ranging from academic medicine to specialty private practice and currently leading ProPath, the largest 100% physician owned pathology and laboratory medicine diagnostic practice in the country. This episode, we are talking about what it takes to go digital in a large group practice. In 2020, ProPath made the leap into digital pathology. We will discover what lessons were learned, what was the business case for digital pathology, what will move the needle ultimately in putting digital pathology into practice, and we will talk about industry forces and consolidation in the laboratory business and what the future is going to look like.

Our guest is Dr. Marilyn Bui from Moffitt Cancer Center a pathologist with expertise in sarcoma, pathology, cytopathology, breast cancer biomarker testing as well as digital pathology. In this episode, we are going to talk about the holistic approach to digital pathology. We will find out if digital pathology is more than the sum of its parts. We will discuss the benefits derived from being highly connected with our systems, our networks or devices, our colleagues and even ultimately, the customers that we serve. In addition, we will look at ways to encourage our colleagues, physicians and other specialties to get on board with digital pathology. We also examine ways to engage the customers we serve to get them active and excited about the digital transformation that's underway.

Roberto Salgado, MD, PhD is a pathologist based in Belgium with expertise in breast pathology and immuno-oncology. He is Co-chair of the International Immuno-Oncology Biomarker Working Group. Over the past several years we have seen large advances and dedication of resources to immuno-oncology. We’ve also seen that information extracted by quantifying Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs) on routine histologic sections adds significant predictive and prognostic information in this area. We have known for over a hundred years, however that assessment of histologic features adds powerful information correlated with patient outcomes. Are we poised for a renaissance in histologic examination, with digital pathology as the engine?

The global COVID-19 public health emergency brought about many changes including a relaxation of FDA regulation of slide scanners and displays in digital pathology. A notice was recently placed in the Federal Register by the FDA through Health and Human services soliciting a 90-day comment period to discuss permanently waving FDA regulation over certain medical devices. We will be discussing the significance of these possible changes with Richard Morroney, Director of Regulatory Compliance at Inspirata.

Dr. Singh is a Professor in Dermatology and Pathology at Northwell Health, New York. He directs the Dermatopathology Section and is the Associate Chair of Digital Pathology. He is board certified in pathology and dermatopathology and board eligible for Clinical Informatics. He is the Founder of PathPresenter, an online digital platform that has 125,000+ users in 170+ countries and is used by multiple academic departments, private pathology groups and organizations in the US and all over the world. We’re going to learn about PathPresenter. What was the unmet need that facilitated its creation. One of the features of digital pathology particularly connectivity among and between pathologists is democratizing access to care , which can mean making the benefits of surgical pathology review available to underserved populations and also making expertise in diagnostics available to fellow pathologists. Many pathologists present cases to tumor board or other multidisciplinary conferences. What challenges and opportunities does this create? And how will pathology education change with increased connectivity and on-demand access to digitally archived images?

We're talking with Dr. Markus Herrmann, Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, and director of computational pathology at Mass General Hospital. At the heart of digital pathology is the transformation of images into data. And in so doing, we've unlocked the exciting field of computational pathology.

As we move toward full scale adoption of digital pathology, it has been said that the computer monitor is going to replace the microscope. If true, that could make the display or monitor one of the most important pieces of equipment. This episode of Digital Pathology Today™ we will focus on monitors and displays, the different levels and grades (consumer vs. medical), how displays are evaluated, the pixel pathway, and the FDA role. We are talking with Jacob Abel of University of Michigan whose primary interest is the selection, assessment, and calibration of displays (monitors) in digital pathology. Find out more on Digital Pathology Today™

This special year end addition will feature a look back add some of the hot topics and memorable guests we've had on the podcast. We'll go way back - over 100 years - to the foundations of pathology and look at what pathology as a discipline has done very well and what the future will hold. We'll look at comparisons of pathology to radiology in terms of barriers to adoption and timelines in converting to digital systems. 2020 was a memorable year, and the most striking event or series of events were related to the global COVID-19 pandemic which facilitated remote sign-out for primary diagnosis. Were we ready for this global health emergency? Regulatory barriers, specifically CLIA and FDA regulations were temporarily waived to facilitate the immediate adoption telepathology. We’ll look at regulation and the emerging field of Regulatory Sciences and hopefully clear up some of the misconceptions. If someone is going to regulate the space it might as well be us. How can we use regulation as a tool to fuel innovation and not as a detriment or hindrance? And we will uncover the truth of the much talked about global shortage of pathologists. This special episode will feature previous guests Tony Magliocco, Ajit Singh, Matthew Hanna, Joe Lennerz, Mark Tuthill, Michael Isaacs and Dan Milner.