Why Standardise

Pathologists examining surgical pathology specimens habitually mark regions of interest relevant to reporting the case. The adoption of digital pathology to report slides has greatly expanded this ability and added new functionality unheard of in the era of the felt tip marker pen. Now annotations can be applied with high precision in any colour and shape limited only by the imagination of the operator. This aspect of pathologist’s lives could be further improved, and the usefulness of this invaluable work greatly enhanced, by the adoption of a systematic approach providing uniformity and consistent functionality transferable between systems and operators. Systematised nomenclature of medicine clinical terms (SNOMED CT) provides a framework and expanding list of codes covering the lexicon of contemporary medicine which can be readily adapted to the annotation of slides. The adoption of unique colours defined by international recognised hexadecimal codes allows for a means of visual recognition of what an annotation is marking and a mechanism to translate data between systems and formats which lack integration. PathLAKE, working in conjunction with Cirdan present a proposal to develop an international standardised library of annotation marks useful in the execution of surgical pathology