PathPresenter.com – An Innovative Platform For Digital Pathology

Let me describe a common scenario that plays out every week in a pathology department:

You want to teach students, residents, or fellows a particular topic. You spend hours searching for cases and find some (but not enough) for a good teaching session. You know the department has a huge collection of great cases hiding somewhere, but you can never find them easily when you need them. You, like many other pathologists, are frustrated that, even in the 21st century, you are presenting pathology to trainees and colleagues (as well at tumor boards and in national/international meetings) with static images or the elusive box of glass slides of interesting cases.

Enter PathPresenter.com: a free-to-use, cloud-based website and social platform that provides an easy way to find the best example of any diagnoses and present digital pathology slides seamlessly with PowerPoint presentations. This website was built and is continually improved by a group of pathologists that understand the issues facing the acceptance of digital pathology in a primarily analog field. PathPresenter has a free slide library of more than 10,000 diagnoses that can easily be arranged in folders for teaching and presenting. PathPresenter also provides the ability to upload the user’s own digital slides and use them seamlessly for teaching. The integrated web viewer allows the slides to stream quickly, and the interaction with the digital slides makes the user feel like he is using his own hard drive storage, rather than off a cloud. Further, the web viewer offers several other tools—slide rotation, brightness adjustment, annotations, and screen capture, that make the user interface very useful and practical. Whole slide images can be uploaded from all major whole slide scanner vendors and is not dependent on the original proprietary file format. Getting intradepartmental or intercontinental consults for virtual slides has been simplified: upload your digital slide and share it with anyone with the click of a button.

Currently, the team at PathPresenter is working to provide new tools to the website:

• The ability to create custom-made, sharable quizzes using the public slide library,
• High-yield study sets that are hand-crafted by sub-specialists in each respective field of pathology.

PathPresenter’s basic functionality will remain free to use; there is no cost to create an account.  Pathologists, especially those with teaching responsibilities to residents and peers, can leverage this program to augment their andragogical prowess and present new opportunities for learning and presenting in pathology.