Wonder how the laboratory and urology community will do with this information:

U.S. Panel Says No to Prostate Screening for Healthy Men

Apparently the serum test as well as the rectal exam and ultrasound are not effective either. This is for healthy men without symptoms only.  Not sure what the effective screening tool is then because you screen healthy, not ill individuals.  Certain to be a lot of pushback, fighting, action groups, political battles and contradictory data to this new recommendation. Stay tuned.

Dark Daily editor Robert Michel writes about the successes of digital pathology in Ontario from a recent visit.

DATELINE: Toronto, Ontario, Canada—Here in the downtown area of Ontario’s largest city is a healthcare organization known as University Health Network (UHN) that operates one of the province’s larger consolidated clinical laboratory organizations. In support of its hospitals, the UHN Laboratory provides an impressive menu of medical laboratory tests.

Read entire story.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA - October 6, 2011

The Open Source Digital Pathology Consortium, Inc. (“OpenDP”) announced its formation today at the Pathology Informatics 2011 meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. The Consortium shall be known as OpenDP.

OpenDP engages academic medical centers, research institutions, and digital pathology manufacturers to create an open source community. The community will contribute and build open source tools for digital pathology. Much of this code has been funded by federal grants and universities. These tools are open to all to use freely.

To date founding members have contributed over 70 person years of effort to open source code for the benefit of the OpenDP community. OpenDP plans to represent our community’s interests as it relates to digital pathology standards.

“With the increased digital pathology adoption at academic medical centers and research institutions,” stated Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Satya), founding Technical Director of OpenDP, “the evolution of an open source community is vital for digital pathology innovation.” Satya is the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and serves as Technical Director to provide leadership for the consortium’s mission.

The founding members include:

• Queens University
• Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, UMDNJ, Center for Biomedical Imaging & Informatics
• The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
• Yale University School of Medicine, Pathology Informatics
• Mass General Hospital, Pathology Imaging and Communication Technology Center
• University of Kansas Medical Center
• University of South Florida
• Johns Hopkins University
• Emory University, Center for Comprehensive Informatics
• Keck School of Medicine University of Southern California at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
• University of Michigan Health System, Division of Pathology Informatics
• The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
• Carnegie Mellon University

Please check http://www.opendp.org to participate and sponsor the community’s growth.

From Stanford commencement address:

Wetzlar, Germany. Leica Science Lab (http://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab), the knowledge portal of Leica Microsystems, offers scientific research and teaching material on the subjects of microscopy and histology, from the basics to specific application know-how.

Learn. Share. Contribute.

Illustrated and interactive tutorials as well as white papers explain technical rudiments all the way from specimen preparation and immunochemistry to imaging, con­trast techniques and high-end technologies such as super-resolu­tion. In addition, Leica Science Lab features scientific articles on spe­cial techniques, applications and areas of research. The content is designed to support beginners, experienced practitioners and scientists alike in their everyday work and experiments. What’s more, the range of topics offered by the portal will be continuously widened.

Leica Science Lab invites its readers to discuss the articles and topics presented. Users’ comments and questions will be used to improve the information on an ongoing basis. At the time of the official go-live date, 100 authors had contributed to filling the portal with in-depth content. Experts in science, methods, and techniques who would like to share their knowledge with the community are cordially invited to pub­lish their articles in Leica Science Lab.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Leica Microsystems is a world leader in microscopes and scientific instruments. Founded as a family business in the nineteenth century, the company’s history was marked by unparalleled innovation on its way to becoming a global enterprise.

Its historically close cooperation with the scientific community is the key to Leica Microsystems’ tradition of innovation, which draws on users’ ideas and creates solutions tailored to their requirements. At the global level, Leica Microsystems is organized in four divisions, all of which are among the leaders in their respective fields: the Life Science Division, Industry Division, Biosystems Division and Medical Division.

Leica Microsystems’ Biosystems Division, also known as Leica Biosystems, offers histopathology labor­atories the most extensive product range with appropriate products for each work step in histology and for a high level of productivity in the working processes of the entire laboratory.

The company is represented in over 100 countries with 12 manufacturing facilities in 7 countries, sales and service organizations in 19 countries and an international network of dealers. The company is headquartered in Wetzlar, Germany.

Nice study in this month's Clinical Transplantation on light versus virtual microscopy. 

Increasingly studies are showing equal or superior interobserver agreement with virtual over light microscopy.  

What if we find whole slides are better than glass slides in terms of diagnostic accuracy compared with "truth" or "gold standard" diagnosis?

Clin Transplant. 2011 Sep 29. doi: 10.1111/j.1399-0012.2011.01506.x. [Epub ahead of print]

Ozluk Y, Blanco PL, Mengel M, Solez K, Halloran PF, Sis B.

05 October - 06 October