Whole-slide imaging for multidisciplinary tumor boards: Reshaping a lymphoma conference at a large academic medical center.

Abstract

Pathology presentations constitute the core of multidisciplinary tumor board (MTB) meetings and play a vital role in patient management in the era of personalized oncology. In most academic medical institutions, these presentations are delivered by pathology trainees using PowerPoint (PPT) slides, which can be time-consuming to prepare and challenging to execute. Whole-slide imaging (WSI) presents a valuable opportunity to create more efficient MTB workflows and enhance participant satisfaction. We share our experience of converting our weekly lymphoma MTB at Northwestern Memorial Hospital from PPT to WSI. We created surveys to evaluate the overall satisfaction of lymphoma MTB participants and hematopathology fellows using WSI vs PPT. A total of 14 MTB participants were surveyed who favored WSI over static photomicrographs/PPT by a wide margin (85.7% vs 14.3%), citing advantages such as improved visualization of tissue architecture and the quality and adequacy of the biopsy, ability to see a greater proportion of the tissue, ease of immunohistochemistry interpretation, and the advantage of having their unanticipated questions answered in real time. Additionally, 8 hematopathology fellows were surveyed, who also favored WSI (87.5% vs 12.5%), citing the improved time efficiency and educational experience, better preparedness to tackle clinicians' questions in real time, improved command over cases, and the added advantage of having a digital repository for educational use. Our findings show that employing WSI for pathology presentations in MTBs boosts participant satisfaction, decreases preparation time, improves workflow efficiency, increases educational value, and improves the well-being of pathology trainees.