Digital pathology program could help patients get a diagnosis faster in Kitchener

Getting a diagnosis in Kitchener may soon be easier thanks to a $1 million gift for Grand River Hospital and St. Mary’s General Hospital.

The funds from the Savvas Chamberlain Family Foundation will help bolster a digital pathology program.

Pathology is the study and diagnosis of diseases. It can involve examining surgically removed tissues, organs and bodily fluids. Pathologists examine tissues to help find a diagnosis for a patient.

Under the program, health care teams will be able to digitize pathology slides, enabling pathologists to examine and share high-resolution images of tissue samples online remotely. The Digital Pathology Lab will be used on all tissue pathology samples, benign and malignant.

In a release, representatives for the hospitals said, “This not only increases efficiency but also opens doors for collaboration between medical professionals across the globe, leading to more accurate diagnoses and improved treatment plans for patients.”

“What it does is moves us away from an old technology – a very manual, analog technology that’s over 200 years old, using a light microscope,” Dr. Dimitrios Divaris, Grand River Hospital and St. Mary’s General Hospital’s Chief and Medical Director of Integrated Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology explained.

“We can now scan pathology images and we can interpret them using the scanned images. That allows us to collaborate. We can send a case within the department or to other institutions for difficult diagnoses. We can get another opinion of an expert pathologist if needed,” Divaris said.

The program will also incorporate artificial intelligence (A.I.).

“We’re going to be able to tap into some of those A.I. tools as we mature our diagnostic digitization pathology. It will be a tool that our pathologists can lean on to help look at very complicated cases and seeing what’s out there as a resource, almost like a library,” Renee Giroux, Integrated Director of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Grand River Hospital and St. Mary’s General Hospital said.

As for the donor, he said it is a cause very close to his heart.

“I am passionate in fighting cancer. My family was hit by cancer,” Savvas Chamberlain said. “I am passionate to use some of my own personal resources and some of the resources of our foundation to fight cancer.”

He also hopes to see the project expand to other hospitals.

The move comes after a 2022 pilot project explored what is possible through the technology. The equipment comes from Huron Digital Pathology in St. Jacobs.

The hospitals said the project is also being supported by OBIO, a not-for-profit, membership-based organization dedicated to developing human health products.