INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Telepathology for Remote Unreached Communities Feasibility during public health emergencies
Diagnosis is often difficult in the remote unreached communities with no access to professional pathologists although it is fundamental to provide appropriate treatment. During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it has become more important to accommodate innovative technologies of digital imaging and telecommunications for remote primary diagnosis, specialist referrals, research, and educational purposes. In this paper, we present recent progress in the research of telepathology in Bangladesh. Md Jiaur Rahman, Md Moshiur Rahman, Masayuki Kakehashi, Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Hiroshima University
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elepathology can be explained as the electronic transmission of digital images of pathology for education, research, diagnosis, or consultation. The term ‘telepathology’ was invented in a scientific article by a pathologist Dr Ronald S Weinstein in 1986, who is also recognised as the ‘father of telepathology’. Using the internet and advanced telecommunication to provide remote diagnosis service is known as telepathology. The research of telepathology raised up and involving different field of research, education and using artificial in tendency. Currently, many countries have endeavoured to the analysis of research in telepathology for different poorhouses and beginning from the materials supplied by bibliometrics. In the early 1950s, telepathology was developed from video microscopy (i.e., Television Microscopy) research to video microscopy used in basic research in the biological sciences. In 2011, during a multinational telepathology conference in Venice, Italy, the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first telepathology article (an editorial) in 1986 was marked and noted by Vincente Della Mea. A wide variety
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A SI A N H O S P I T A L & H EA LT HCAR E M A N AGE M E N T
of digital slide imaging devices was demonstrated by twenty imaging companies. However, none of them were interoperable. The standards of telepathology were either nonexistent or at an early stage of evolution at the time of this multinational conference. Afterwards, although, more than 400 laboratories in 32 countries have published telepathology articles, proportionately few of them use telepathology in their practices apart from transformation of irregular
IS S UE - 50, 2020
intraoperative frozen section diagnosis or second opinions on problematic surgical pathology. For the surgical pathology cases, by using the realtime video imaging or stored imaging, telepathology system supports the diagnosis. One of the examples of telepathology innovation and collaboration is to support to patients' benefits for the distance diagnostic service by this change and adaptation. Numerous commercial and academic telecommunications networks have been