Abstract
Since George Papanicolaou proposed the famous test pap about 60 years ago, and due to heavy impact on cervical cancer reduction, cytopathology became a popular discipline, and in some countries, a medical specialty. The microscope is still the primary device in cytopathology laboratories; however, modalities for molecular tests and networks hosting laboratory information systems and imaging systems produce enormous data. Nowadays, competing mobile devices are integrated with the environment, always connected and always on the user side. Therefore, it is expected that applications for the mobile device targeting cytopathology would flourish. There is potential for applications to various activities of the laboratory including and not limited to training, reporting of results, diagnosis and consultation, management of the laboratory, whole slide imaging and still image capture, quality control and assurance, and numerous channels for interactions between patient-doctor or among medical specialists. The mobile device can enhance the cytopathology laboratory and offer numerous benefits.
TopIntroduction
The practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices is called Mobile Health, in short mHealth or m-health (Adibi, 2015). Mobile computing and modern communication devices, mainly smart phones and tablet computers, has rapidly grown and nowadays are still growing. mHealth applications have been used vastly to collect health-related data, delivery of healthcare information, monitoring in real time patient vital signs, and provisioning of healthcare services, to mention the main application streams.
mHealth has been applied in ambulatory medicine (K. Banitsas, Perakis, Koutsouris, Konis, & Tachakra, 2005; K. A. Banitsas, Perakis, Tachakra, & Koutsouris, 2006; Kiselev, Gridnev, Shvartz, Posnenkova, & Dovgalevsky, 2012; Pavlopoulos, Kyriacou, Berler, Dembeyiotis, & Koutsouris, 1998; Rosales Saurer, Mueller-Gorchs, & Kunze, 2009; Zerth, Besser, & Reichert, 2012), management of diabetes (Miyamoto, Dharmar, Fazio, Tang-Feldman, & Young, 2018; Modzelewski, Stockman, & Steenkamp, 2018; Ribu et al., 2013; Spat et al., 2013; Torbjornsen, Smastuen, Jenum, Arsand, & Ribu, 2018) and asthma (Finkelstein, Hripcsak, & Cabrera, 1998; Gupta, Chang, Anyigbo, & Sabharwal, 2011; Rudin et al., 2017; Xiao et al., 2018), control of obesity (Callender & Thompson, 2018; Delisle Nystrom et al., 2018), smoke cesation (Ghorai, Akter, Khatun, & Ray, 2014; Ybarra, Holtrop, Prescott, & Strong, 2014), management of seizure (Pandher & Bhullar, 2014) and stress (Clarke et al., 2014), depression treatment (Burns et al., 2011; Miranda et al., 2018), parkinsons disease patient management (Tsiouris et al., 2017) among others.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Mobile Health (mHealth): The practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices.
Quality Control: The set of processes by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in product, service or activity, during QC processes, the products, services and activities are tested or validated in order to reveal defects and problems, before their release.
Cytopathology: A specialty of medicine related to the study and diagnosis of diseases by the examination of cells.
Telecytology: The application of cytopathology from distance.
Telediagnosis: Is the determination of a disease at a site remote from the patient based on transmitted data.
E-Learning: Is a broad concept referring to the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) for learning purposes.
Laboratory Information System (LIS): Or laboratory information management system (LIMS) is a software-based system for the support of operations in a modern laboratory, such as workflow, sample tracking, data exchange interfaces, LIS systems are often capable to be connected with medical analyzers for automated extraction and storage of measurements.
Pathology: From Greek pathos (p????), meaning “suffering” and -logia (-????a), meaning study, a medical diagnosis and research field, studying cause of diseases, traditionally by tissue, cells or body fluid analysis via the microscope. Cytopathology is considered a sub specialty of pathology in many countries.
E-Health: Is the healthcare supported by electronics, informatics and tele-communications.
Virtual Slide: or whole slide imaging, a virtual slide is created when a glass slide is entirely scanned digitally.