SENGLAT Yoan

A Better Lens On Disease

This text talks about a remake of pathology, a profession that has processed samples the same way for more than 100 years.
In the late 1990's, a scientist called Dirk G. Soenksen imagined a new future for pathology. After 18 months of hard laboring, he finally created a new technique to process samples : digitizing. The operation is simple , you just have to insert your sample into a scanner. A microscope objective moves back and forth over the slide, and a camera captures the image, resulting in a  very high resolution image of your sample.
Before this discover, pathologists used to put their glass slides under a microscope. But this method has tangible limits : it is the pathologist who analyzes the samples. As good as he can be, it may still have errors on interpretation, even on the analysis phase.
Dirk's new technique brings the solution, by allowing digitized images of biopsies to be manipulated and processed by computer. By this way, precision is fairly increased due to the completely objective analysis handled by the computer. It is pretty easy for a software to analyze differences we cannot distinguish by eye.
But this is not its only benefit. It can indeed be an useful tool for sharing samples instantly all over the world. If a pathologist wants to share his slides, he just have to connect to a net image server, and upload his digitized scans. By doing so, his samples  will be accessible for all the other scientists who have access to the server. This is a great step forward, considering the old way (which was to send your slides by airmail).
The only big negative point is the time that it takes to scan a sample : Up to 2 minutes per slide. Scanning slides for one medical center would take five years of scanning !
However, if  we look at all the benefits, we can say that this technique will have a bright future.