Jeroen van der Laak, Associate Professor Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands shares his view on digital pathology and computational pathology.
#ibelieve - Digital pathology is really a very good tool, because it allows for more efficient workflows. And we can reach colleagues for consultation much easier. I think the next step in that will be computational pathology, which is the area we are researching in Nijmegen. Computational pathology will bring that one step further and really help us to streamline the diagnostics process. For instance by selecting clearly negative cases that a pathologist should not have to see or not spend a lot of time on. Or maybe focus the attention of the pathologist specifically to certain slides, certain regions that are of interest.
I can imagine that in some point we really get more information from tissue sections, because of the algorithms. So what we discuss now is taking over a small part of what the pathologist does. For instance finding tumor. You can of course also think of an algorithm that gets information from a tissue sections that is beyond of what the human visual system can do. The computer can look at a section and get information that we as humans just cannot do. And I think in the maybe longer future that will also start playing a role. And I think that it really could maybe dramatically change the field. Maybe that is too big, but at least I think it will play a major role in the future of pathology
