What started for me as a passion in photography and work using a microscope as a trainee pathologist has given birth to “ePathPG”.

Telepathology is an emerging field in pathology and is only going to grow with advances in the kind of technology used. Telepathology has the potential to close geographical gaps, access to specialists globally and offer diagnostic service to countries like PNG still struggling to produce adequate number of specialist doctors to serve the ever growing population. I first wrote about it here in 2007 on this blog. Other articles are here, here,  also here. Some more articles here,  and here. My articles were also referenced by an online magazine “Hospital and Health Care Management”. 

ePathPG is a digital image management system that a we have developed. We originally meant to use the “Path” to mean Pathology but I think “Pathway” also makes sense. Because ePathPG has applications in other areas of telemedicine including teleradiology, dermatology, cytology and general practice where a digital image is needed to make a diagnosis.

Version 1.0 of ePathPG is now live online and we are doing a validation trial. We are using an Olympus BX41 digital microscope to capture the images from the glass slides but the cost of purchasing such a system would be expensive making our project unsaleable nationally. So we are also exploring the option of capturing the images using smartphones with smartphone optics adapter. The second option is much cheaper, there is very good 3G and 4G mobile coverage in PNG making our project scale-able!