Grid Technology in Telepatology and Personalised Treatment

Abstract

Histopathology requires automation, quality control and global collaborative tools. Usually the PIMS (Pathology information management system) automates samples, images and reports and progressively incorporates the PI (Pathology informatics), the D-PATH (digital pathology), e-PATH (electronic pathology), the PPH (Patho-pharmacology), virtual autopsy (VA) and all type of translational research in the PMIS. Not being subject to a specific standard, quality control follows ISO-13485:2003 on services and medical devices, ISO 17025:2005 on technical aspects; and ISO-15198:2003 for automate and quantifiable procedures that will be affected by the new European Directive on medical devices. For the non-standardized pathology procedures, consumer’s requirements are what define test and calibration procedures. The paper analysed the non-standardized procedures: VS (Virtual Slides), GRID networking and Literature Based Discovery as tools for knowledge discovery of relevant relationships on image-diagnosis and personalized treatments. Standardized procedures available for search and annotation are the ISO/IEC 11179 Information Technology Metadata Registries specification, the ISO/IEC 13250:2003 for topics maps or MPEG-7 & 21 for images and the ISO/IEC 24800-3 for JPEG query search. The forthcoming innovations prepare to quality certify the so called “solo-pathology” robotic labs, supported by telepathology to reduce diagnostic errors and carrying out a relevant task on personalized treatment through GRID technology. In this environment the JPEG query search play a relevant role on images which metadata can be annotated on natural language.