The Artificial Intelligence in Digital Pathology and Digital Radiology: Where Are We?

This book is a reprint of the Special Issue entitled "The Artificial Intelligence in Digital Pathology and Digital Radiology: Where Are We?". Artificial intelligence is extending into the world of both digital radiology and digital pathology, and involves many scholars in the areas of biomedicine, technology, and bioethics. There is a particular need for scholars to focus on both the innovations in this field and the problems hampering integration into a robust and effective process in stable health care models in the health domain. Many professionals involved in these fields of digital health were encouraged to contribute with their experiences. This book contains contributions from various experts across different fields. Aspects of the integration in the health domain have been faced. Particular space was dedicated to overviewing the challenges, opportunities, and problems in both radiology and pathology. Clinal deepens are available in cardiology, the hystopathology of breast cancer, and colonoscopy. Dedicated studies were based on surveys which investigated students and insiders, opinions, attitudes, and self-perception on the integration of artificial intelligence in this field

Bioelectronic technologies and artificial intelligence for medical diagnosis and healthcare

The application of electronic findings to biology and medicine has significantly impacted health and wellbeing. Recent technology advances have allowed the development of new systems that can provide diagnostic information on portable point-of-devices or smartphones. The decreasing size of electronics technologies down to the atomic scale and the advances in system, cell, and molecular biology have the potential to increase the quality and reduce the costs of healthcare. Clinicians have pervasive access to new data from complex sensors; imaging tools; and a multitude of other sources, including personal health e-records and smart environments. Humans are from being able to process this unprecedented volume of available data without advanced tools. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help clinicians to identify patterns from this huge amount of data to inform better choices for patients. In this Special Issue, some original research papers focusing on recent advances have been collected, covering novel theories, innovative methods, and meaningful applications that could potentially lead to significant advances in the field

The Process of Digital Pathology and its Application in a Study

Digital pathology saw its advent in the 60’s with the introduction of telepathology and was brought into a brighter spotlight in the late 90’s through the technological breakthrough in histopathological imaging, called whole slide imaging (WSI). With steady growth in interest among experts, the latest breakthrough in WSI happened in 2017, when both the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Union approved the use of WSI systems in primary diagnostics. So far, the adoption of digital pathology has been slower than many expected, but many laboratories around the world are looking to switch into a digital workflow. In this text, I aim to describe the history and the technical basics of digital pathology and WSI, as well as discuss some of its most widely used and promising applications in education, research, telepathology, clinical work, and image analysis. To better illuminate the digital workflow, I describe the use of digital pathology in a study by Anttinen M et al., in which the author of this text participated in the form of digitizing the whole slide images used in the study. With the advancements in digital pathology in the past two decades and with the regulation catching up, wider adoption WSI systems is to be expected. Many advantages can be associated with digital pathology e.g., better results in learning for students, cost reductions in clinical work, and the reduction in pathologists’ workload due to automated image analysis methods

PACS de patologia: uma plataforma centralizada para a gestão de imagem médica de patologia

The clinical area of digital Pathology is still giving its first steps in the development of interoperable solutions that enable the distributed acquisition, storage, and visualization of medical images, including diagnostic support tools. Nowadays, digital management solutions use proprietary image formats and communication protocols that are not compatible with the DICOM standard. Moreover, the available technologies are not mature enough to support the practice of medicine in an area where scanned images can reach several gigapixels, requiring new engineering approaches to support huge volumes of data, in the order of gigabytes per study, that need to be consumed in real time. This dissertation aims to research and develop new technologies and associated information systems, capable of supporting the digital acquisition of pathology images, their centralized archive, sharing, and collaborative review with decision support tools. The result is an innovative web solution, focused on increasing productivity, with safe diagnostics and based on normalized protocols. A common web browser was transformed into a professional workstation that is able to access the image repository at any place and time, regardless of the operating system and without any prior installation.A área de Patologia clínica digital ainda se encontra a dar os primeiros passos no desenvolvimento de soluções interoperáveis que permitam a aquisição, arquivo e visualização distribuída da imagem, incluindo ferramentas de suporte ao diagnóstico. Os atuais cenários de revisão à distância usam aplicações proprietárias que não são interoperáveis com a norma DICOM. Isto deve-se ao facto de a tecnologia não estar suficientemente madura para apoiar a prática clínica numa área em que uma imagem digitalizada pode atingir vários giga-pixels, requerendo novas soluções de engenharia para suportar grandes volumes de dados, da ordem de gigabyte por estudo, que necessitam de ser consumidos remotamente em tempo real. Esta dissertação teve como objetivo estudar e desenvolver tecnologias e sistemas de informação que permitam a aquisição digital da imagem de patologia, o seu arquivo centralizado, a partilha e revisão colaborativa com ferramentas de suporte à decisão. O resultado é uma solução Web inovadora, de elevada produtividade, diagnóstico seguro e baseada em processos e protocolos normalizados. Um Web-browser comum foi transformado numa estação de trabalho capaz de aceder ao arquivo em qualquer altura e qualquer lugar, independentemente do sistema operativo, computador ou dispositivo móvel.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

Public health department perspectives on cervical and prostate cancer prevention in southeastern Kentucky.

This study compared and contrasted the screening and prevention methods and strategies utilized by public health departments in southeastern Kentucky for both cervical and prostate cancer. Special attention was paid to how such efforts have influenced decreases in mortality rates over the past two decades. The study used both geospatial methods, such as Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and spatial autocorrelation, and qualitative methods in form of interviews. The interview data showed that Kentucky public health departments had strong cervical cancer screening and prevention programs, but did not focus on prostate cancer prevention. Successes in cervical cancer screening included the expansion of resources and services through the Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Program, community outreach, and an increase in transportation access. For prostate cancer, only two health departments had reported offering any type of services. Other counties attributed prostate prevention success to an increase in physicians in the area and the work of employers to encourage screenings. When these results were explored through further geospatial data analysis, there did not seem to be any major correlations between the interview data and clusters of incidence and mortality rate changes. The reasons for a decrease in mortality in cervical cancer are more evident than for prostate cancer, from the perspective of the health department. The key finding was that prostate cancer does not garner the public funding support that cervical cancer does. In order to discover the cause for prostate cancer mortality rate decrease in southeastern Kentucky, the public health department is not the ideal place to look

Incorporating Problem Based Learning into a Secondary International Baccalaureate Biology Curriculum

As expressed in the 21st century skills framework, the goal of education is to create lifelong learners who can contribute to society. To accomplish this task, students must be exposed to real world problems providing students the opportunity to retain knowledge for future acquisition and application. Problem based learning (PBL) is distinct from other learning philosophies and strategies because it centers content and skills on problems instead of providing a list of concepts and then trying to make them applicable to the real world (Jonassen & Hung, 2008). Most PBL research and curriculums have been created at the college level, in particular, in medical related programs. Implementing PBL activities at the secondary level can be challenging due to the content required to solve real world problems and the complexity of these problems usually involving multiple solution pathways. This capstone project will address the challenges associated with implementation by using different components of PBL (worked examples, structural analogues, case studies, and simulations), utilizing a problem difficulty rating scale (level of complexity and structuredness), and incorporating scaffolding techniques (analogical encoding, causal relationships, argumentation, questioning, and modeling) to help students become successful at the secondary level. Within the project, the human body unit was chosen to show how using a variety of implementation strategies discussed above can make college level content accessible to secondary level students. Also, the unit allows students to act like real life doctors by using each patient’s history, symptoms, and test results to determine a diagnosis. Essentially, this capstone project will show how a teacher can take a traditional unit such as human body systems and turn it into a PBL unit filled with authentic, mind-challenging but supported learning tasks