Shorts on Standards: Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise develops vendor-agnostic approach to interoperability of digital pathology data using the DICOM standard
May 2025—Digital pathology has revolutionized tissue-based diagnostics by allowing remote viewing of scanned slides on a display and the use of computational algorithms. However, the implementation of digital pathology has not been without growing pains, with issues arising from the proliferation of proprietary image formats from competing vendor solutions and lack of interoperability between different information systems. Diagnostic data aggregation currently requires toggling between applications that may not be synchronized to patient, specimen, or case. Clinical reporting involves manually pasting diagnostic data between information systems. Measurements, enumeration, and sophisticated analysis of images by machine learning algorithms may also require manual entry of that data.