Virtual Microscopy in Virtual Tumor Banking

Virtual Microscopy Tagging and Its Benefits for Students, Faculty, and Interprofessional Programs Alike

Background

Over the years, due to technological innovations in medical education, virtual microscopy has become a popular tool used to teach histology. The Virtual Microscopy Project is a faculty and student collaborative project at the University of South Florida (USF) Health to transfer and update online histology slides from an outdated viewer to a completely new viewer.

Methodology

The project goal is to better facilitate the educational experience for students and faculty through the implementation of updated technology and features.

Results

At USF Health, multiple programs use the online histology slide viewer to teach normal histology. The previous website’s organization and lack of additional features severely hindered opportunities for personalized education; users could not write any notes, circle or point to important features, or easily search for specific organs or tissue. An updated website user interface and additional instructional features will improve the students’ accessibility and overall quality of their learning. The updated viewer will be more integrated into the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine (MCOM) curriculum, providing faculty with organized and readily available material. USF MCOM has faculty integration directors to create a balanced curriculum that can be reviewed by faculty for consistency and accuracy. Adding this same organizational structure to the online microscopy viewer will assist directors in forming and modifying the curriculum and may also provide them with additional resources for their education delivery.

Conclusion

The Virtual Microscopy Project hopes to produce an accessible, user-friendly online microscopy viewer that is beneficial to students for learning, to faculty for teaching/curriculum planning, and to medical education as a whole.

Application of remote online learning in oral histopathology teaching in China

Background

The aim of this study was to investigate the application of remote learning and virtual microscopy in oral histopathology teaching, a unique experience in China. The oral histopathology teaching in Nanjing Medical University has been extraordinary.

Material and Methods

98 third-year dental students of Grade 2016 took oral histopathology theoretical course face-to-face in 2019 (Traditional group). The 94 participants of Grade 2017 took online oral histopathology course using digital methods(E-Learning platform and Virtual Simulation Experiment Teaching Center for Dentistry) in 2020. During the practical laboratory sessions, the students in both Traditional group and Online group observed the same glass slides for morphological learning. A questionnaire survey explored students' attitudes towards the remote online learning. Results: The mean Theory test scores of the Online group (80.93±12.15) were significantly higher than those of the Traditional group (73.65±8.46) (P < 0.01). The mean total scores of the Online group (82.94±10.76) were significantly higher than those of the Traditional group (77.25±7.55) (P < 0.01). The percentage of high total test score (test score > 85) of the Online group (54%) was also significantly higher than that of the Traditional group (15%) (P< 0.01). Furthermore, both remote learning and virtual microscopy courses were well accepted by students according to the questionnaire.

Conclusions

This study found that remote learning and virtual technology have a positive impact on oral histopathology. The findings reveal that the application of remote online learning has enhanced oral histopathology teaching in China.

Key words:Oral histopathology, dental undergraduate students, virtual microscopy, remote online learning, questionnaire.

HistoViewer: an interactive e-learning platform facilitating group and peer group learning

Understanding tissue architecture and the morphological characteristics of cells is a central prerequisite to comprehending the basis of physiological tissue function in healthy individuals and relating this to disease states. Traditionally, medical curricula include courses where students examine glass slides of cytological or tissue samples under a light microscope. However, it is challenging to implement group and peer group learning in these courses and to give students sufficient time to study specimens. An increasing number of medical schools have thus started to implement digital slide viewers, so-called virtual microscopes, in histology and histopathology. These websites are mostly based on standard commercial software and offer limited adaptation to the special needs of first-year students. An e-learning platform has therefore been developed for use in cytology and histology courses. This virtual microscopy tool is coupled to a central database in which students can label and store the positions of individual structures for later repetition. As learning in pairs and peer groups has been shown to provide a high learning outcome, identified structures can be shared and discussed with students' peers or faculty via a built-in communication module. This website has the possibility of opening an arbitrary number of frames which all can actively be moved and changed in magnification to enable the comparison of specimens and thus encourage a more global understanding of related tissues. HistoViewer is thus suggested as an e-learning tool combining several modern teaching concepts.

Recent advances in standards for Collaborative Digital Anatomic Pathology

CONTEXT

Collaborative Digital Anatomic Pathology refers to the use of information technology that supports the creation and sharing or exchange of information, including data and images, during the complex workflow performed in an Anatomic Pathology department from specimen reception to report transmission and exploitation. Collaborative Digital Anatomic Pathology can only be fully achieved using medical informatics standards. The goal of the international integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative is precisely specifying how medical informatics standards should be implemented to meet specific health care needs and making systems integration more efficient and less expensive.

OBJECTIVE

To define the best use of medical informatics standards in order to share and exchange machine-readable structured reports and their evidences (including whole slide images) within hospitals and across healthcare facilities.

METHODS

Specific working groups dedicated to Anatomy Pathology within multiple standards organizations defined standard-based data structures for Anatomic Pathology reports and images as well as informatic transactions in order to integrate Anatomic Pathology information into the electronic healthcare enterprise.

RESULTS

The DICOM supplements 122 and 145 provide flexible object information definitions dedicated respectively to specimen description and Whole Slide Image acquisition, storage and display. The content profile "Anatomic Pathology Structured Report" (APSR) provides standard templates for structured reports in which textual observations may be bound to digital images or regions of interest. Anatomic Pathology observations are encoded using an international controlled vocabulary defined by the IHE Anatomic Pathology domain that is currently being mapped to SNOMED CT concepts.

CONCLUSION

Recent advances in standards for Collaborative Digital Anatomic Pathology are a unique opportunity to share or exchange Anatomic Pathology structured reports that are interoperable at an international level. The use of machine-readable format of APSR supports the development of decision support as well as secondary use of Anatomic Pathology information for epidemiology or clinical research.

Standardizing the use of whole slide images in digital pathology

Whole slide imaging/images (WSI) offers promising new perspectives for digital pathology. We launched an initiative in the anatomic pathology (AP) domain of integrating the healthcare enterprise (IHE) to define standards-based informatics transactions for integrating AP information and WSI. The IHE integration and content profiles developed as a result of this initiative successfully support the basic image acquisition and reporting processes in AP laboratories and provide a standard solution for sharing or exchanging structured AP reports in which observations can be explicitly bound to WSI or to regions of interest (ROI) in images.

Informatics for practicing anatomical pathologists: marking a new era in pathology practice

Informatics can be defined as using highly advanced technologies to improve patient diagnosis or management. Pathology informatics had evolved as a response to the overwhelming amount of information that was available, in an attempt to better use and maintain them. The most commonly used tools of informatics can be classified into digital imaging, telepathology, as well as Internet and electronic data mining. Digital imaging is the storage of anatomical pathology information, either gross pictures or microscopic slides, in an electronic format. These images can be used for education, archival, diagnosis, and consultation. Virtual microscopy is the more advanced form of digital imaging with enhanced efficiency and accessibility. Telepathology is now increasingly becoming a useful tool in anatomical pathology practice. Different types of telepathology communications are available for both diagnostic and consultation services. The spectrum of applications of informatics in the field of anatomical pathology is broad and encompasses medical education, clinical services, and pathology research. Informatics is now settling on solid ground as an important tool for pathology teaching, with digital teaching becoming the standard tool in many institutions. After a slow start, we now witness the transition of informatics from the research bench to bedside. As we are moving into a new era of extensive pathology informatics utilization, several challenges have to be addressed, including the cost of the new technology, legal issues, and resistance of pathologists. It is clear from the current evidence that pathology informatics will continue to grow and have a major role in the future of our specialty. However, it is also clear that it is not going to fully replace the human factor or the regular microscope.

Lossy compression in diagnostic virtual 3-dimensional microscopy--where is the limit?

Data compression is inevitable to reduce the huge data amounts of virtual slides, especially in virtual 3-dimensional (3D) microscopy. Lossy compression influences the image quality and leads to recognizable compression artifacts above a compression ratio of 20:1 in JPEG2000 format. To test out whether higher compression ratios are acceptable in diagnostic pathology, we prepared virtual 3D slides of gastric biopsy specimens with or without Helicobacter pylori gastritis using 5 different compression ratios as follows: 20:1, 40:1, 50:1, 75:1, and 200:1. The virtual 3D slides were diagnosed in a blinded manner by 3 pathologists according to the updated Sydney classification. The results showed no significant differences using virtual 3D slides with any compression of up to 200:1. We conclude that compression ratios higher than those commonly used can be applied in virtual microscopy, even in diagnostic applications.

How to implement grid technology in tissue-based diagnosis: diagnostic surgical pathology

BACKGROUND

Tissue-based diagnosis or diagnostic surgical pathology is a highly accurate, sensitive and specific medical diagnostic technique that has expanded rapidly in using both molecular biology and computer technology.

OBJECTIVE

The objective is to analyze the present stage and potential influence of distributed data acquisition, analysis and presentation in tissue-based diagnosis by using recently developed standardized network systems such as grids.

METHODS

Interpretation of medical data is often based upon specialized examination, visual information acquisition and transfer as well as upon data collected from various sources. Efficient and accurate diagnostics require standardized data and transfer modes, which can be provided by a grid environment. The medical requirements, construction of an adequate grid environment, practical experiences in various medical disciplines and potential use in tissue-based diagnosis are described.

CONCLUSIONS

Grid technology is probably a useful tool to meet the conditions of tissue-based diagnosis in the near future, and will probably play a significant role in its further development.