Background and motivation: Digital pathology has been evolving over the last years, proposing significant workflow advantages that have fostered its adoption in professional environments. Patient clinical and image data are readily available in remote data banks that can be consumed efficiently over standard communication technologies. The appearance of new imaging techniques and advanced artificial intelligence algorithms has significantly reduced the burden on medical professionals by speeding up the screening process. Despite these advancements, the usage of digital pathology in professional environments has been slowed down by poor interoperability between services resulting from a lack of standard interfaces and integrative solutions. This work addresses this issue by proposing a cloud-based digital pathology platform built on standard and open interfaces.
Methods: The work proposes and describes a vendor-neutral platform that provides interfaces for managing digital slides, and medical reports, and integrating digital image analysis services compatible with existing standards. The solution integrates the open-source plugin-based Dicoogle PACS for interoperability and extensibility, which grants the proposed solution great feature customization.
Results: The solution was developed in collaboration with iPATH research project partners, including the validation by medical pathologists. The result is a pure Web collaborative framework that supports both research and production environments. A total of 566 digital slides from different pathologies were successfully uploaded to the platform. Using the integration interfaces, a mitosis detection algorithm was successfully installed into the platform, and it was trained with 2400 annotations collected from breast carcinoma images.
Conclusion: Interoperability is a key factor when discussing digital pathology solutions, as it facilitates their integration into existing institutions' information systems. Moreover, it improves data sharing and integration of third-party services such as image analysis services, which have become relevant in today's digital pathology workflow. The proposed solution fully embraces the DICOM standard for digital pathology, presenting an interoperable cloud-based solution that provides great feature customization thanks to its extensible architecture.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence; DICOM; Digital pathology; Image analysis; PACS; VNA.
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