[1350] Utility of VIPER (Virtual Imaging for Pathology, Education & Research) in Continuing Medical Education and Slide Surveys

T Barr, K Nicol, D Billiter, K Wohlever, P Baker, V Prasad. Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, OH; Ohio Supercomputer Center, Columbus, OH

Background: Current slide survey programs utilize glass slides for continuing medical education and are fraught with challenges. Examples include difficulty obtaining, cutting, staining, and shipping of multiple glass slides, inability to annotate slides and potential for discrepancy among slides due to loss of tissue in deeper sections. Digital pathology systems provide high-quality images that correspond to entire glass slides and provide image quality equivalent to a microscope. Use of digital pathology in teaching venues addresses these issues with slides by reducing the quantity of tissue and slides required, permitting multiple annotations and allowing all participating pathologists to review the same image.
Design: Virtual Imaging for Pathology, Education, & Research (VIPER) is a web-based application designed to facilitate digital reviews of whole slide images, providing an interface to whole slide images, pathology reports, and custom forms. Same images can be viewed independently or simultaneously. VIPER utilizes a relational database system capturing review data, generating multiple reports of interest. VIPER Team has partnered with a Supercomputer Center which contains an infrastructure providing high capacity data storage, a high performing network, and the ability to access high performance computing. We have had success with in-house pathologist review of web based images.
Results: There are challenges with established working groups adapting to new technology. Minimal training quickly improved the acceptance and comfort in utilizing digital images rather than the microscope and glass slides.
Conclusions: Benefits of providing high quality digital images in a custom application for educational prevails over traditional methods as it is cost effective. Digital technology enhances the learning experience by allowing multiple annotations as well as allowing multiple users to view the same image from different physical locations simultaneously. The use of VIPER is already creating a digital archive of clinically annotated data sets providing continued value to the pathology community. In the future these data sets could be utilized for continuing medical education, pathology reviews and research.
Category: Informatics

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 9:30 AM

Poster Session V # 211, Wednesday Morning