Increasing workload
Shortage of pathologist
One of the main topics of conversation today in the treatment of cancer is the impact of precision medicine. The speed in which precision medicine will become affordable and as accurate as possible will only will become reality when institutions and departments begin to support the development of computational pathology.
Computational pathology was created to help improve the pathology ecosystem and go beyond to help a range of laboratory activities and goals, including:
A central role for Pathologists
Pathologists taking more of a leadership position within their institutions is key to the success of computational pathology as it require deep changes within the lab.
Connecting the non-pathology department
To get the entire patient data the pathologist must network with several non-pathology departments to obtain the data required to make clinical decisions.
1 – Louis DN et al, Computational pathology: an emerging definition, Arch Pathol Lab Med, Volume 138, Issue 9, 2014
2 - Sara Bainbridge et al.. (2016). TESTING TIMES TO COME?. Available: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/sites/default/files/testing_times_to_come_nov_16_cruk.pdf
3 - Cancer Facts & Figures - Association of American Medical Colleges. (2014). Physician Specialty Data Book. Available: https://members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/Physician%20Specialty%20Databook%202014.pdf
4 – Kaiming He et al. (2015). Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification
5 - Louis DN et al, Computational Pathology. A Path Ahead, Arch Pathol Lab Med, Vol 140, 2016