Towards a national strategy for digital pathology in Switzerland

Abstract

Precision medicine is entering a new era of digital diagnostics; the availability of integrated digital pathology (DP) and structured clinical datasets has the potential to become a key catalyst for biomedical research, education and business development. In Europe, national programs for sharing of this data will be crucial for the development, testing, and validation of machine learning-enabled tools supporting clinical decision-making. Here, the Swiss Digital Pathology Consortium (SDiPath) discusses the creation of a Swiss Digital Pathology Infrastructure (SDPI), which aims to develop a unified national DP network bringing together the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) with Swiss university hospitals and subsequent inclusion of cantonal and private institutions. This effort builds on existing developments for the national implementation of structured pathology reporting. Opening this national infrastructure and data to international researchers in a sequential rollout phase can enable the large-scale integration of health data and pooling of resources for research purposes and clinical trials. Therefore, the concept of a SDPI directly synergizes with the priorities of the European Commission communication on the digital transformation of healthcare on an international level, and with the aims of the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) for advancing research and innovation in the digitalization domain. SDPI directly addresses the needs of existing national and international research programs in neoplastic and non-neoplastic diseases by providing unprecedented access to well-curated clinicopathological datasets for the development and implementation of novel integrative methods for analysis of clinical outcomes and treatment response. In conclusion, a SDPI would facilitate and strengthen inter-institutional collaboration in technology, clinical development, business and research at a national and international scale, promoting improved patient care via precision medicine.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Biomedical research; Image analysis; Pathology; Precision medicine.

Fig. 1

Network map for SDPI. SDPI will establish a unified national DP network bringing together the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) with Swiss university hospitals. SDPI envisages that clinical data, veterinary pathology data (Vetsuisse) and whole slide pathology images generated at the university hospitals will be provided to the SPHN for storage and countrywide access on the BioMedIT Network with subsequent inclusion of cantonal and private institutions. Users will be able to search the SDPI network through a centralized registry for the formation of virtual research cohorts and clinical trials

Fig. 2

Illustration of expected SDPI data collection, processing, and user experience. SDPI data is generated at each partner institute through (a) digitalization of routine histology sections in SDPI scanner infrastructure to generate SDPI WSIs and (b) collection of the associated coded and standardized pathology data for each case. SDPI data is provided to the Regional Data Service Centre of the university hospitals, is unified with existing SPHN datasets and is subsequently pushed to the nearest Regional Data Node (RDN) of the BioMedIT network. Relevant clinical data and cohort characteristics are aggregated in the SDPI registry extension, affording (1) the opportunity for a single-access point for dataset querying by the user, after which (2) the user can view, process and download the SDPI data in a distributed manner from the respective RDN nodes where the data resides. Alternatively, (3) the user can upload their containerized experiment to the BioMedIT computational nodes where it is executed remotely