Digital & Computational Pathology - Professor of Pathology and Pathologist, Italian AMC

An associate professor of pathology at an Italian Academic Medical Center discusses their current use of digital pathology at their institution. They mention that they have three scanners which are mainly used for digitizing slides for research purposes. The scanned slides are stored on their disk, but they plan to acquire another scanner for routine diagnostic practice. The funding for the digitalization project came from the Italian Ministry of University and Research, and it was specifically allocated for digitization. The stakeholder mentions that the use of scanners for diagnostic purposes is not common in Italy due to the difficulty in receiving funding from the Ministry of Health, who does not yet understand the full importance of digital pathology. They believe that demonstrating better efficiency and reproducibility with digital pathology, especially with the use of artificial intelligence tools, could help in obtaining funding. In the next five years, the stakeholder expects the number of scanned slides to increase, but notes that the main issue is the lack of a cloud storage system. They also mention that Italy is lagging behind other countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and the UK in digital pathology. Finally, they believe that breast cancer could be a particularly good use case for digital pathology, especially for the assessment of predictive biomarkers.