Review on digitalization of basic routine procedures in histopathology laboratories

Abstract

Digitalization is the process of converting of analog to digital. Slowly but surely, healthcare is going digital. Many of the recent innovations in healthcare, from telemedicine and smart devices to the growing capabilities in managing big data, can be traced back to the adoption of new digital technologies that have fostered a different way of working. Across medicine’s varied specialty areas, however, the adoption and progress of digital technology advances varies significantly. Digitalization in histopathology laboratory in Nigeria, is still a big setback, but there are digitalization in some of the usual routine practices like the automatic tissue processor which has overtaken the usual manual processor. In the area of sectioning, staining of tissues, mounting of slide and slide reading, we still face major setback in that regard. Digitalization in routine histopathology laboratory also offers new possibilities not available within the conventional microscope. A promising technique is automatic scoring and other kinds of digital image analysis (DIA). In a review, [1] conclude that current DIA methods are able to produce quantitative assessments of immunohistochemically stained slides with a similar variability as manual assessment. In other studies, quantitative digitalization methods have been shown to outperform manual work for certain applications, such as in Ki67 proliferation assessment [2] and prediction of recurrence in prostate cancer [3]. However, [3] highlight the fact that a full-scale investigation of DIA methods considering all aspects of the clinical situation is still lacking. In histopathology, and particularly in molecular pathology, there are an increasing number of tests, and an increasing demand to support faster, more-accurate disease diagnosis-and subsequent treatment and care-particularly for cancer (Figure 1).