About the DPA

MISSION

 

To facilitate awareness, education, and adoption of digital pathology and AI applications in healthcare and life sciences. Members are encouraged to share best practices and promote the technology among colleagues to demonstrate efficiencies, share knowledge, and its ultimate benefits to patient care.

 

HISTORY

 

The Digital Pathology Association (DPA) was founded in 2009 and represents a collaboration between healthcare professionals and industry leaders. The DPA has over 4,000 members consisting of pathologists, scientists, technologists, and industry representatives. For many years, the DPA has worked with the FDA to help secure clearances for whole slide imaging equipment, thus, creating a more productive workplace for pathologists and healthcare institutions as well as enhancing patient care. The DPA continues to look towards the future for the needs of pathologists and is active in creating standards and interoperability for the users and producers of this technology. For more on the background of the DPA click here.

 

BYLAWS

 

Click here to see the DPA's full bylaws.

 

 

ABOUT DIGITAL PATHOLOGY

 

Digital pathology is a dynamic, image-based environment that enables the acquisition, management and interpretation of pathology information generated from a digitized glass slide.

 

Healthcare applications include primary diagnosis, diagnostic consultation, intraoperative diagnosis, medical student and resident training, manual and semi-quantitative review of immunohistochemistry (IHC), clinical research, diagnostic decision support, peer review, and tumor boards.

 

Life Science applications include high throughput scanning of glass slides, quantitative analysis of whole slide images, immediate web based consultations with expert pathologists, and secure archival of pathology data.

 

Digital pathology is rapidly gaining momentum as a proven and essential technology; with specific support for education, tissue based research, drug development, and the practice of human pathology throughout the world.  It is an innovation committed to the reduction of laboratory expenses, an improvement of operational efficiency, enhanced productivity, and improving treatment decisions and patient care.

 

It can often be difficult to describe digital pathology without getting too technical. Following is a video produced by Nasjonal IKT in Norway. The three minute video does a wonderful job describing the many benefits of digital pathology.