Pathobox: The Collaborative Tele-pathology Platform with Access Management

Abstract

Recent technological advances in medical informatics led to the adoption of new technologies in pathology clinical area. Digital pathology is allowing the acquisition, storage, and distribution of pathological digital samples, which are gathered by scanners and displayed in network workstations. This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of digital pathology, and how it is changing education, training, and medical practice nowadays. A new paradigm of collaborative telepathology is proposed through a cloud-based architecture, fully compliant with the DICOM standard, that integrates a cross-platform pathology viewer, collaborative tools, virtual work-spaces, and personal storage areas. Data management and privacy are ensured through the implementation of a role-based access control mechanism. The solution was designed to serve distinct use cases, including telepathology and eacademy.

Software tools and platforms in Digital Pathology: a review for clinicians and computer scientists

“…Examples of such software are AperioImageScope (Leica Biosystems), HCImage Hamamatsu software (Hamamatsu Photonics), and OptraASSAYS (OptraScan). On the other hand, there are closed-source platforms developed by third parties, e.g., Image-Pro (Media Cybernetics), APP Center (Visio Pharm), Aiforia, Pathobox, 30 and Halo image analysis platform (Indicalab). Since all of these are closed architectures, it is impossible to add functions as an external user, and most of them are too expensive for researchers, students, or small laboratories.…”