ABSTRACT
Establishment of telepathology services has been, arguably, one of the more difficult technical challenges in telemedicine. Conventional surgical pathology diagnoses are made by pathologists examining glass histopathology and cytopathology slides through conventional light microscopes. Light microscopy carried out in person, hands on, is the counterpart of telepathology where diagnoses are rendered at a distance. Light microscopy-based diagnoses are universally recognized as the gold standard for imaging-based medical diagnostic services. Surgical pathology diagnostic accuracy standards are also very high compared with the diagnostic accuracy of most other medical diagnostic imaging modalities, including computerized tomography and ultrasound. The acceptable level of diagnostic accuracy for surgical pathology diagnoses is generally set at 97%, or higher. This makes the margin for error for surgical pathology diagnoses extremely narrow for telepathology system developers, especially for a process involving complex decisions made by human observers. Nevertheless, pathologists rendering diagnoses with telepathology systems have been expected to equal, or even exceed, this very high standard. Not unexpectedly, this has been difficult to achieve and, quite literally, has been 30 years in the making 582[1–2]. Also, almost any application in medicine that involves using robotics to manipulate specimens, including glass slides upon stained tissue sections are mounted can be inherently challenging for that reason alone. Robotic technologies are used in several of the types of telepathology systems introduced by Weinstein’s group, but not all [1–12].
