Digital Pathology

The CHTN was an early adopter of digital imaging (DI) to support and enhance biomedical research. The DI service has several advantages over traditional glass slide reviews, including eliminating glass slide distribution, solving logistical issues required by rapid turnaround times, reducing the costs of tracking lost or broken glass slides, and securing accessibility anytime via the Internet. It can also be used to promote digital pathology reviews among collaborating investigators, electronic medical archiving, and education for numerous local, national, and international research projects.

The CHTN divisions scan glass-mounted H&E-stained sections from tissue blocks or tissue microarrays (TMAs), which are available to the research community. The CHTN has developed a web-based digital library platform to connect researchers with digital images and corresponding limited data sets. The limited data set includes the age, race, and gender of the patient along with the CHTN ID, QC result, anatomic site, primary or metastatic status, metastatic to the anatomic site, tissue type, percent necrosis, and percent tumor. The limited data will also include the diagnosis and molecular results (if applicable). The platform allows investigators to query the available images to create a dataset of images related to their research project. The online platform allows investigators to download the images to their servers for analysis.