Picturing pathology

A Stanford University team has developed a computational pathology system called C-Path that provides more accurate prognostic scores of breast cancer tissue than classical pathology.¹ The next steps are modifying the method to handle whole-tissue slide samples and seeing how it performs in a prospective, multicenter trial.

Traditionally, pathologists visually characterize the type and aggressiveness of breast cancer using only three cellular features-the percentage of tumor made up of tubular structures, the diversity of nuclei in cells and the frequency of cell division-and assign prognostic scores based on a scale first proposed in the 1920s. Identifying tissue types as skin, duct or organ lining (the epithelia) or connective tissue (the stroma) is an important part of the grading system...