Context: Digital imaging is increasingly common in medicine. Vendors of anatomic pathology software have addressed this need by integrating digital image acquisition and storage into their products. While offering a number of advantages, these solutions cannot be easily adapted to accommodate the existing work flow for many pathology departments.
Objective: To describe a novel solution that maintains the advantages of these integrated solutions but offers many additional flexibilities, making it more compatible with the work flow in most clinical departments.
Design: This solution involves separating the image acquisition step from the image archiving process and creating dual-image storages for greater usability. Software needed to deploy this modular and scalable solution is described.
Results: We have deployed this solution at our institution and achieved widespread acceptance and use, with minimal training required. Deployment in the surgical pathology gross specimen room, in particular, has resulted in a significant increase in the number of photographs taken and the percentage of cases documented photographically.
Conclusions: The complete clinical digital imaging solution described herein is an effective, scalable solution for pathology imaging at a departmental level. Although developed and implemented in an anatomic pathology department, the method described is generally applicable to digital imaging in any large multiuser environment.