Digital pathology service provides faster diagnosis

An innovative digital pathology service that enables experts to identify cancerous tissue more quickly is set to be expanded.

The digital system at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals provides a diagnostic service which is both faster and more cost effective by allowing histopathologists to view slides remotely on a computer. It means that experts based at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital can provide a rapid diagnosis while the patient is still in the operating theatre at the Northern General Hospital.

The system has been developed and implemented by the Trust’s Laboratory Medicine and Informatics teams for the intraoperative frozen sections service. Frozen sections are done when an immediate answer is essential; for example, to determine whether tissue is cancerous to guide the surgeon during the course of an operation.

Tissue is removed from a patient’s body during surgery or a biopsy and sent to the histopathology laboratory, where it is processed and cut into thin sections, mounted on glass slides and analysed under a microscope. This plays a pivotal role in cancer diagnosis and staging (describing the extent of cancer within the body), which helps determine treatment options.

The digital system speeds this process up by enabling microscope slides to be scanned at high resolution and then viewed remotely on a computer screen instead of a microscope. Slides scanned near the operating theatres at the Northern General Hospital can be viewed by experts at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, providing a faster and safer service for patients.

The implementation was led by Dr Jonathan Bury, Clinical Lead for Histopathology.

He said: “We have started the process of conversion to digital pathology using the intraoperative frozen sections service. It is a relatively small number of cases, but this is a clinically critical application.

“This project was used for training of our histopathologists and the initial validation of the technology and processes. We have shown that digital pathology could benefit patients, save consultant and operating theatre time and reduce costs.

“Digital pathology has great potential; it can give us more flexibility and make us a very attractive place to work. This will be very important in a very competitive histopathology job market."

Dr Branko Perunovic, Clinical Director of Laboratory Medicine, said Sheffield Teaching Hospitals was among the first Trusts in the UK to introduce digital pathology as a mainstream service and the plan was now to undertake a phased expansion.

ENDS

Picture caption: The Digital Pathology Team of Dr Branko Perunovic, Dr Jonathan Bury, Directorate Manager Louise Dunk and Lead Labs Manager Emma Colgan

MEDIA CONTACT:
John Birch, Communications Officer
Tel: 0114 226 8989
Email: john.birch@sth.nhs.uk
john.birch@sth.nhs.uk


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