Overcoming the limitations of integrated clinical digital imaging solutions

Digital imaging is increasingly common in medicine. Vendors of anatomic pathology software have addressed this need by integrating digital image acquisition and storage into their products. While offering a number of advantages, these solutions cannot be easily adapted to accommodate the existing work flow for many pathology departments.

To describe a novel solution that maintains the advantages of these integrated solutions but offers many additional flexibilities, making it more compatible with the work flow in most clinical departments.

This solution involves separating the image acquisition step from the image archiving process and creating dual-image storages for greater usability. Software needed to deploy this modular and scalable solution is described.

We have deployed this solution at our institution and achieved widespread acceptance and use, with minimal training required. Deployment in the surgical pathology gross specimen room, in particular, has resulted in a significant increase in the number of photographs taken and the percentage of cases documented photographically.

The complete clinical digital imaging solution described herein is an effective, scalable solution for pathology imaging at a departmental level. Although developed and implemented in an anatomic pathology department, the method described is generally applicable to digital imaging in any large multiuser environment.