What Pathology Needs, and Why It’s Needed Now

AUTHOR: Mark Lloyd, vice president of Pathology, FUJIFILM Healthcare Americas Corporation

As challenges in the practice of pathology continue to increase, leading healthcare companies are striving to provide relief. FUJIFILM Healthcare Americas Corporation has nearly a century of experience in medical imaging and has always kept its patients as its primary focus. We believe Enterprise Imaging is at the heart of optimal patient care, because when we can see the whole patient, we can treat the whole patient. Therefore, it has been very natural for Fujifilm to take the lead in efforts to bring modern digital tools to laboratory medicine and pathology professionals. For the last 15 years, the Fujifilm pathology software development group has been building a best-of-breed solution for digital workflows that started as the Digital Pathology Cockpit®, evolved into Dynamyx® by Omnyx®, and now has grown into Synapse® Pathology.

Heritage and experience are important. The field of pathology recognizes the value of history and distinction, as well as innovation and change. Some of the most impactful changes to pathology in recent decades have been sub-specialization, immunohistochemistry, sequencing, and associated assays. Each of these innovations has brought critical insights to patient diagnoses, targeted therapies, and precision medicine. Arguably, a rapid and accurate diagnosis from pathology is the most impactful way to direct a patient’s medical path and optimize their health outcomes.

However, the advances that have made pathology professionals so effective as precision diagnosticians have also stressed our systems. We are asked to do more with less. Sign out more cases. Review more complex cases. Order more tests. Take more time. All the while, reimbursement rates and the number of pathologists per capita are going down, and the number of challenging cases, such as cancer, is increasing in many places around the world. Simply put, our profession is stretched.
It is time for a new revolution to make our practice as successful as it can be. Fujifilm is offering Synapse Pathology, the leading FDA-cleared solution for primary diagnosis, to assist pathologists with some of the daily stresses the practice is currently experiencing. There are numerous product benefits to consider, including:

  • A real-time Collaboration® tool that operates like a virtual multi-headed microscope, making it easy to share cases with other pathologists
  • Tools that alleviate many of the struggles related to preparing and presenting at multidisciplinary or consensus conferences
  • Workflow orchestration tools that allow you to remotely load-balance workflows and contribute to case reviews for primary or secondary diagnosis
  • Measurement and annotation tools that help you perform distance-to-margin calculations, as well as IHC counting and scoring
  • Instant access to digital recuts or prior cases
  • Identification of research cohorts
  • Ability to build a personal library of interesting cases
  • A teaching set of digital recuts

We pathologists now have the ability to untether ourselves from glass and use digital tools for use cases that make sense to us as individuals or as groups. These use cases can increase our efficiency1 and increase our daily satisfaction.2

For instance, Charles Barkey, AVP of IT at West Virginia University Medicine, recently commented that Synapse Pathology “is allowing us to automate the workflow for the pathologist as we’ve done for the radiologist, which allows the viewers to interact and enables one-click access for our doctors.” Our customers appreciate that our software becomes the backbone of their digital system to support advancements in the field, including interoperability and AI algorithms.

There is a digital use case for everyone—a use case that can give you an advantage. To help you and the patients you serve, we invite you to find your digital advantage with Synapse Pathology by Fujifilm. Visit us here to learn more about our product, find us at upcoming events, or contact us to schedule a demonstration for your organization.

  1. Lujan G, Kellough DA, Frankel WL, Chhibber NN, Parwani AV, Chen W, Li Z, Lombardo A, Walsh J, Lloyd M. Faster than glass: a digital pathology workflow unlocks major time-savings. United States & Canadian Academy of Pathology’s (USCAP) 111th Annual Meeting. Los Angeles, CA. March 19-24, 2022.
  2. Vodovnik A, Aghdam MRF. Complete routine remote digital pathology services. J Pathol Inform. 2018 Oct;9:36.