Imaging bridges pathology and radiology

Abstract

In recent years, medical disciplines have moved closer together and rigid borders have been increasingly dissolved. The synergetic advantage of combining multiple disciplines is particularly important for radiology, nuclear medicine, and pathology to perform integrative diagnostics. In this review, we discuss how medical subdisciplines can be reintegrated in the future using state-of-the-art methods of digitization, data science, and machine learning. Integration of methods is made possible by the digitalization of radiological and nuclear medical images, as well as pathological images. 3D histology can become a valuable tool, not only for integration into radiological images but also for the visualization of cellular interactions, the so-called connectomes. In human pathology, it has recently become possible to image and calculate the movements and contacts of immunostained cells in fresh tissue explants. Recording the movement of a living cell is proving to be informative and makes it possible to study dynamic connectomes in the diagnosis of lymphoid tissue. By applying computational methods including data science and machine learning, new perspectives for analyzing and understanding diseases become possible.