Challenge

• Proper diagnosis of cancer requires expert pathologist review of the patient’s suspected cancerous tumor biopsy slide.
• But this task can be done only by MD pathologist who are very less in number and available mostly in bigger cities.
• This severe shortage of pathologists creates a major bottleneck in the healthcare system and makes cancer diagnosis very inaccessible to the whole population.
• Hence patients from smaller towns and villages first struggle to find a pathologist and then finally travel to bigger cities, and then again wait a long time for his report.
• 50-70% of cancer cases are detected only at an advanced stage.
• This long delay in diagnosis first causes patient’s cancer to progress unchecked causing avoidable complications and his treatment to start much later and hence his survival chances reduces significantly.

Solution

• There is an immediate need to make cancer diagnosis accessible to the whole population.
• Digital Pathology technology makes this possible by allowing pathology slides of patient tumor biopsies to be viewed and reported remotely by expert pathologists.
• Senior pathologists in bigger cities can instantly give their expert diagnosis.
• This way correct cancer diagnosis can be greatly speeded up and will save lot of patient lives.