On 25 April, Barco hosted a pathology congress as part of the AIDPATH project in its new headquarters in Kortrijk, Belgium. The AIDPATH project brings together academia and industry peers with the aim of developing efficient and innovative products for digital pathology. “ Today, we wanted to assemble luminaries from the field to present the research that has been done together with the government, universities, etc. in order to come to a good digital pathology solution,” says Geert Carrein, Barco’s VP Strategic Marketing for diagnostic imaging. 

How to make digital slides look good 

As one of the key partners, Barco organized a workshop with a focus on image quality in digital pathology, from slide acquisition to visualization. Advances in the field of digital pathology visualization were discussed. New technologies and perceptual evaluation studies for calibrating and standardizing medical image display devices were shown. And different metrics for ensuring image quality and quality assurance through the chain were analyzed. 

Cédric Marchessoux, research engineer at Barco and Congress Chairman, explains: “A lot of challenges need to be addressed before digital pathology can hit the market. First of all, the images are huge requiring very high resolution imaging devices. Moreover, analyzing pathology images is a complex practice and exchanging samples or slides between labs is difficult which prevents effective collaboration. That’s why we need to put our heads together and exchange ideas so we can take the digitization of pathology one step further.”