Breakthrough Technologies in Digital Pathology

Abstract

The 12th European Congress on Digital Pathology (ECDP 2014) was held from 18 to 21 June 2014 at the College des Bernardins in Paris, thanks to the support of the French Pathology Society, and with the collaboration of the Association for Developing Informatics in Cytology and Anatomic Pathology, ADICAP and the French Cellular Haematology Group, GFHC. By bringing along pathologists, scientists and industrials, this conference highlighted the dynamics of the communities involved in the evolution towards digital pathology. Among the challenges raised by this evolution, being able to bring justified and traceable responses has become an ethical priority for the patients and the healthcare professionals. From this perspective, the digital pathology will certainly bring an important increase in the quality of healthcare. In order to assess this evolution, seven journal papers have been selected from the ECDP 2014 presentations, for their pertinence and their originality, from the information and imaging technologies perspective. We entitled this special issue “Breakthrough Technologies in Digital Pathology”, as a stimulus to new challenges for the future of digital pathology. New perspectives about the use of semantics at the helm for a knowledgeable Whole Slide Image (WSI) exploration are presented. Indeed, in the perspective of a traceable ethical healthcare as the rise of big data challenges, semantic technologies will play a fundamental role in the future of digital as the integrative pathology. The modelling of visual appearance, very close to the cognitive and perceptual points of view, is considered as a key point for an ergonomic interface between WSI and the pathologist. In the continuation of the perceptive problems, the modelling of the visual appearance as a comparative study between frequential and spatial colour textons is presented followed by an interesting approach using Fourier ptychography. Coming close to computer-aided diagnosis, we selected an interesting weak supervision approach. Finally, promising advances in heterogeneity and precise localisation problems complete the range of the selected papers, coming closer and closer to daily routine in histopathology. We believe that the digital pathology will be a bridge for a smoother integration of all these challenges and viewpoints in the future of the pathology and we hope being able to participate to the on-going revolution of digital pathology by bringing them to your attention.