The Digital Pathology Project is a joint venture between Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the University of Leeds.
Digital Pathology and whole slide imaging – the complete digitisation of slides – has the potential to transform the practice of diagnostic Pathology just as Radiology has been revolutionised by the introduction of digital imaging over the past 30 years with a resulting improvement in quality and safety of reporting, and innovation in the analysis and manipulation of radiological images.
So called “virtual slides” are enormous digital images produced by scanning glass slides at very high resolution (200,000 dots per inch). The resulting images are gigapixels in size – far larger than images taken by even the best digital cameras. Digital Pathology promises significant benefits in the delivery of patient care. For example:
- Previous slides can easily be accessed when they are needed, rather than having to be retrieved from the archive
- In a fully digital workflow with manual patient identification steps removed, the risk of getting slides mixed up so that a patient receives the wrong diagnosis (something that happens rarely but can have serious consequences when it does) is significantly reduced
- Out of hours services and specialist second opinion services can be created, enabling patients to receive an expert decision more quickly
Further information can be found on the University of Leeds Virtual Pathology page.
Project Team
Consultant Histopathologist, Honorary Senior Lecturer
Dr Darren Treanor
0113 206 7850
[email protected]
Dr Darren Treanor MB BSc (Computing) MD PhD is a Consultant Pathologist, honorary clinical Associate Professor at the University of Leeds and Guest Professor in Digital Pathology at Linköping University, Sweden. He runs the Leeds Virtual Pathology Project which has been carrying out Digital Pathology research and development since 2003. He has co-authored over 60 papers in the medical and computing literature, most of them concerned with the application or development of Digital Pathology in clinical and preclinical research. He was the principal investigator on the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) – funded project entitled “A virtual reality microscope for pathology”. This project studied current diagnostic and teaching practice in Pathology to inform the development of a better Digital Pathology workstation (the “Leeds Virtual Microscope”) for diagnostic use, which has now been deployed across the Yorkshire region of the UK for Pathology training and successfully commercialised. He is the lead for the Royal College of Pathologists group writing guidelines on Digital Pathology, using evidence gathered by the Leeds Digital Pathology research group including the only systematic review of Digital Pathology in clinical diagnosis.
Specialty Registrar, Pathology Fellow
Dr Bethany Williams
0113 2068743
[email protected]
Dr Bethany Williams is the first digital pathology fellow in the world. Appointed in 2015, her project is to transition the Trust to digital breast cancer diagnosis, including the safe validation of digital pathology. She is a clinician by training and currently in the final stages of her training, about to take her FRCPath (board) exams. She was a co-author on the recent systematic review of digital pathology published in Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and lead author on the Leeds systematic review of discrepancies in digital pathology, currently submitted for publication. This later work is a foundation piece for the UK Royal College of Pathologists guidelines for digital pathology, currently being developed.
Project Manager
Bash Hussain
07827 976 843
[email protected]
Bash is the dedicated project manager working with Dr Treanor to implement Digital Pathology across the Department. He has over 15 years’ experience of project and programme management across a number of sectors including the NHS and Local Government.