Digital Pathology Data Brokerage: A Standard Recommendation for Complex Digital Pathology Information Web-Services

A novel recommendation for the Digital Pathology Information Web-Services (DPIWS) standard is presented, with respect to specific characteristics of the informative content of discourse. The recommendation establishes a common software interface for the exchange of digital pathology (DP) images and related metadata over the web, independently of storage, encoding, and internal handling details. The proposed structure is implemented and tested in a “Pathomation” software environment. Background One of the major obstacles to establishing and adopting effective telepathology processes over time has been their lack of information brokerage standardization. Digital pathology information is characterized by a complex structure and high data volumes. Effective handling and sharing demands in-depth interdisciplinary skills, which, along with industrial vendor proprietary formatting and data locking, makes essential information brokerage a challenging process. Digital pathology imagery and annotation distribution is, to date, partially covered by specific portions of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Open Microscopy Environment (OME) standards. In addition, DP information sharing bears significant similarities to other disciplines (e.g., Geographical Information Systems), the distribution of which has been highly standardized for decades. The proposed recommendation (DPIWS) delivers a standard web interface definition allowing requests for DP information elements handling and sharing across the web, through platform-independent and image format-agnostic calls. Methods DPIWS comes as an independent recommendation. It strictly conforms to and expands the DICOM standard, with respect to the Open Microscopy Environment, and the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) standard. Digital pathology images are partially covered by the DICOM standard, according to the procedures of the DICOM Standards Committee 2011, Part 3: Information Object Definitions under VL Microscopic Image Information Object Definition Content Constraints A.32.2 and VL Whole Slide Microscopy IOD Content Constraints A32.8. In addition, generic URL requests for retrieving a DICOM Visual Light Image are defined under DICOM 2011, Part 18: Web Access to DICOM Persistent Objects (WADO). However, the response is a single, standard encoding image with all annotations rendered (burned) on the image; no method for requesting or handling annotations in any form other than an image is identified. Metadata, like annotations, on microscopy images