PATHONE: From one Thousand Patients to one Cell

Abstract

Digital Pathology is a recent clinical environment in which Electronic Health Records (EHRs), biopsy data and whole-slideimages (WSI) come together to provide pathologists the necessary information for making a diagnosis. Integration of this heterogeneous data into a single application is still one of the challenges in the evolution of pathology to a digital practice. While pathologists can perform diagnoses routinely on digital slides only, this is not the case in clinical research. For such purposes, the link between clinicopathological information of patients and images is essential. For example, image analysis researchers who develop automated diagnostic (support) algorithms need to select a representative set of slides to evaluate their methods. To achieve this, they need applications that combine cohort specification, slide image exploration, and selection of suitable images. We present the visualization tool PATHONE, which enables users to perform these steps on a single screen, integrating cohort and WSI selection.