Beverley J Hunt^1
1Kings Healthcare Partners

One of the areas of laboratory haematology that takes up considerable time and skill is reporting on full blood counts and bone marrow aspirates. The time taken to train clinical and laboratory haematology staff to perform full blood count morphology and study bone marrow aspirates is also an issue.

Digital morphology offers a new way of analysing films and bone marrows in that looking at a digital slide rather than looking down a microscope enable films to be studied remotely, allow for the first time the ability for staff to work from home and saving time for a Clinical Haematologist to travel to and from their laboratory to review slides. 

A further development is to introduce AI to the digital scan so that a preliminary analysis can be performed. This is a project being undertaken by Scopio, a Tel Aviv company who we are working with to validate their programme. 

Where do we go in the future? There are issues such as malaria diagnosis where the process is time consuming – relying on the preparation of thick and think films and 10-20 minutes of a person’s time. After that species needs identifying, often difficult for a novice. This are would lend itself to an AI programme. More potential areas will be discussed

See Hematology & Full-Field Morphology | Scopio Labs

Leslie Burnett^1,2,3
1Garvan Institute of Medical Research; ²St Vincent's Clinical Healthcare Campus UNSW Sydney; ³Virtus Health Specialist Diagnostics

Pathology reports are the primary mode of communication of results from the laboratory to the requesting clinician. Contemporary reports are largely text-based, and frequently monochrome. It is also commonplace for the clinician to receive a version of the report rendered by their local IT system that may differ in appearance from that generated by the laboratory.

This presentation will review the regulatory requirements for what should be present in a “good” pathology report, along with new tools to help pathology practices identify non-compliant reports. It will then describe important work being led by local pathologists to standardise reporting practices that carry risk of error or misinterpretation.

Finally, examples will be provided of new directions that pathology reports are exploring. These include: embedded “hot” links to Pubmed articles and educational resources, and AI-facilitated garnering of relevant information predicted to be useful for report interpretation or for planning next patient management steps.