Dr. John Gilbertson, Associate Chief of Pathology at Mass General – Department of Pathology in Boston shares his view of digital pathology and computational pathology.

We have been doing Pathology for a hundred years, at least. We knew how to do it and you do it very well. But it was limited by the technology that we had.
The basic idea of digitalizing a slide has been accomplished. It will be better over time but it is established now. But the real thing about digital pathology is, it allows us to move forward and take the technologies that the rest of the world is using to go forward. Pathology can now also go forward. We are allowing machines(machine learning) to get access to our slides and those machines are giving us insights. What the diagnosis might be and what the biologic processes might be. Again, these are brand new ideas. Could not have been done 10 years ago, now it is happening across the country.
The FDA decision, I think, has made digital pathology real for the pathology organizations, that each pathology department, the companies that do this. It went from a time “It was a nice thing that will happen in the future” to “It is happening right now”.
The great majority of the people, today, do not have access to high quality pathology care.
Once you have digital material, available for everybody, the whole business model of pathology will change, we will drive better diagnosis for more people something we couldn’t have never done before.
What computational pathology can do, building on whole slide imaging and digital pathology is really provide a multiplier for pathologists and a check for errors in pathology really anywhere. Once you have digital material available for everybody, and large amounts of it, you will create innovation. We will have a lot of activities on the next 10 years, you'll see large companies that are involved in this and you'll see pathologists using AI tools based on digital pathology as routine in the next 10 years.
Has Digital pathology changed Pathology? Not yet but it will very soon. I’m most happy it happened and I'm thrilled where it can go next. #ibelieve

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