Observations from USCAP 2009 – From A to Z
Attended the USCAP meeting in Boston over the weekend. On Saturday attended the DICOM Working Group 26 (WG 26) meeting. A copy of the document discussed is available here. This was my first DICOM WG 26 meeting (as an observer) and my sense is they are close to getting the document into a DICOM format within a year with some assistance in the actual writing of the document in DICOM format. The committee has certainly made great strides. Will provide updates as more information gets released following the meeting.
On Sunday gave a talk about digital pathology at an evening seminar hosted by BioImagene along with Jared Schwartz, MD, PhD, CAP President, Mahul Amin MD, Chairman of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Cedars Sinai & Ajit Singh PhD, CEO of BioImagene.
Spoke briefly on use of pathology images in our hospital PACS, image analysis and what I am calling Pathology 2.0 – that is the use of Web 2.0 technology in the surgical pathology practice. Blogging aside, gave several examples of using the tools of technology of Web 2.0 to harness collective intelligence in simple terms where anyone can participate, share, exchange and collaborate.
People have already moved on to Web 3.0 where anyone can innovate but that is for another post…
The meeting was well attended in record number this year with over 4,000 registrants. I saw several excellent scientific sessions and posters with continued focus on molecular pathogenesis and less direct observation or correlation with immunohistochemistry.
My sense of the attendance at the meeting with a large number of housestaff is a reflection of travel budgets. I think budgets for meetings and conferences are being scaled back (including at my institution) and if given a meeting to attend, this is it.
On the exhibit floor there were many notable products and services displayed among just over 100 vendors. Here is a short review (in alpabetical order) of some of my observations:
Aperio showed me a demo of their SecondSlide sharing service for pathology and their application for referring and consulting pathologists to share whole slide images.
BioImagene released several new products including a family of scanners on the heels of a recent flurry of activity and press releases. Their booth showcased several new applications including PathXchange, an online professional networking portal for pathologists worldwide. This is another example of Web 2.0 and of course joined the community – look for my cases soon. I did not get a chance to see PathSearch, their product in collaboration with Visuvi for content based image retrieval (CBIR).
Clarient continues to bring to market innovative products and services in cancer diagnostics.
DMetrix did not exhibit at the meeting. You can still check out their comments on other vendors over at their blog, Virchow's Pixel (great name – why didn't I think of that?)
Quest Diagnostics showcased their virtual IHC service, InScape (video link).
Lastly, SlidePath demonstrated their products for use in the clinical space, including their Digital Slide Server which is compliant with Aperio Scanscope, Hamamatsu Nanozoomer and Zeiss Mirax digital slides.
Clearly digital pathology vendors have increased their footprint at this meeting with the largest showing to date and I expect this to continue for some time at other similar clinically-oriented pathology meetings.
