Dear readers, an unlocked door awaiting all of us with tons of opportunities as we log out of 2017 and log in to 2018. Let’s grab those, bringing changes and smile in many lives. Happy New Year
Cancer is now a leading cause of death worldwide. Every year, across the world 8.2 million people die from cancer. As the World Health Organization (W.H.O) estimates, deaths from this deadly disease will continue to rise, reaching over 13.1 million in 2030.
W.H.O flags that two-thirds of these deaths occur in low and middle-income countries. More than 50 percent of cancer deaths could have been prevented through awareness campaigns, or could have been effectively addressed through expert screening, early diagnosis and affordable treatment.
From this perspective, ‘digital pathology’ offers an immense potential to make a significant difference in the lives of many, who are either high risk individuals, or actually suffering from life threatening ailments. In this article, I shall try to illustrate the above point, in simple language, citing the emerging role of ‘digital pathology’ in cancer, as an example.
Incidence of cancer in India:
W.H.O reports that presently in India, cancer is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. This is vindicated by the 2016 Press Release of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) stating that, the total number of new cancer cases was expected to be around 1.45 million in 2016, and the figure is likely to reach nearly 1.73 million new cases in 2020.
ICMR expected over 736,000 people to succumb to the disease in 2016 while the figure was estimated to shoot up to 880,000 by 2020. The data also revealed that only 12.5 percent of patients come for treatment in early stages of the disease. Another reportestimated that around 2.5 million individuals in India are living with the cancer.
Launch of cancer screening program:
Realizing the increasing incidence of cancer, ‘the National Program for the Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke (NPCDCS)’ was initiated in 100 districts in 2010, and expanded to about 468 districts in 2012, in tandem with other Non Communicable Diseases (NCDs).
After further review, the Government informed the Indian Parliament on April 01, 2017 about the launch of universal screening of diabetes, hypertension and cancer in 2100 districts, which would be extended across the country. Accordingly, ‘Operational Guidelines for Non-Communicable Diseases’ were worked out and made public.
A large number of cancer cases remain undetected:
It is worth noting, India is still among one those countries where a large number of cancer cases remain undetected or under-diagnosed. The country continues to grapple with a huge dearth of specialists in this area. These include not just cancer specialists, which reportedly is just 1 over 2000 cancer patients, but qualified pathologists, as well. This stark reality assumes greater importance, as early diagnosis with precision is the key to successful treatment of cancer.
It’s more in rural India:
Availability and access to affordable cancer diagnostic facilities, are indeed a major issue much more in rural areas – the home of over 70 percent of the Indian population. Consequently, its late detection, together with low awareness level for disease prevention, is considered to be the major factors attributing to relatively higher cancer mortality rate in the country.
The intensity of this problem increases manifold and gets more complex, due to various other geographic and logistical constraints. This situation makes high-technology based medical interventions a necessity to save many lives.
A unique public-private partnership initiative:
Interestingly, some developed countries are also trying to address the core issue of increasing access to affordable cancer diagnosis and treatment to all. An example of which can be drawn from the United Kingdom (UK), where one of finest Universal Health Care (UHC) system exists, for a long time.
On December 06, 2017, by a media release Roche Diagnostics announced a groundbreaking partnership discussions with the UK Government to transform cancer testing in patients.’ It said that the current shortage of pathologists and geographic constraints can make it difficult or longer for an expert to provide an opinion on a cancer patient case, where ‘digital pathology’ can play a crucial life-saving role.
Roche Diagnostics articulated that once important patient-cases are made available digitally, experts from any location can review them without delay. This would lead to availability of more equal access to experts to provide a timely and accurate diagnosis for cancer patients. It further said, making more information available electronically opens possibilities for the discovery of new treatments and the development of Artificial Intelligence algorithms in pathology diagnosis.
A Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) approach, such as the above can add greater efficiency, especially in tissue pathology services – including the expensive ones, to deliver faster and more accurate test results across the health care space, even in India. It goes without saying, such a PPP initiative has to be fleshed out with considerable details to unleash its true potential.
Thus, ‘digital pathology’, I reckon, has the potential to play a path-breaking role in providing access to affordable and early diagnosis of cancer to a large number patients, even in remote places, leading to better outcomes.
The scope of ‘digital pathology’:
It now brings us to the question of: what exactly is ‘digital pathology’? In simple term, ‘digital pathology’ involves remotely examining the whole slide digital imaging of original pathological slides of a patient, virtually in real time, from anywhere in the world to properly diagnose a disease. In case of cancer, these are digital image of original blood and tissue slides of patients, examined by experts with the application of special ‘digital pathology’ software and hardware, from a distant specialty hospital or laboratory.…Continue
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