KU Medical Center faculty develop cutting-edge new medical Web teleconferencing system

One of the major challenges in medicine is getting the proper expert in place in a timely fashion to make a diagnosis. Too often, quick and accurate care is hampered by the delays caused by time and distance.

Two doctors at the KU Hospital developed a pilot project utilizing Web teleconferencing, digital radiology and automated pathology slide scanning to develop what hopefully could become a system to provide off-site services. That service would include expert radiologists and pathologists being able to assist off-site doctors with quick diagnosis, which could speed up treatment regiments and potentially provide better outcomes.

One of the two doctors, Ossama Tawfik, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the KU Medical Center, said using this type of technology will be critical in the future delivery of medicine.

“It is expected that within a few years, 70 percent of our practices will be outpatient, located outside the main campus. The advent of localized medicine separates the entire patient team including referring physicians, diagnosticians and surgeons. The end result is a potential breakdown in communication that could affect treatment options and patient outcomes,” he said.

Joining him in the study was Mark Redick, a breast radiologist at the KU Cancer Center’s Richard and Annette Bloch Cancer Pavilion.

“Radiologists and pathologists have unique training and each are dedicated to the detection, diagnosis and staging of disease. It requires an integrated approach on the part of the radiologist and pathologist, but, regretfully, it is common practice to rely on a written description of the targeted lesion provided by either the pathologist or the radiologist,” Redick said.

The geography of the KU Hospital helped make a pilot project possible. The hospital, where the pathologists are located, is 1.5 miles away from the Richard and Annette Bloch Cancer Pavilion. The project allowed the professionals to conduct collaborative diagnoses while allowing for variables such as differences between glass and digital diagnoses, image quality and comfort level in using digital slides. The pilot project included the analysis of 122 breast core biopsies from 106 patients, but only benign cases were studied. The study’s focus was to evaluate whether Web conferencing impacted decision-making as far as treatment plans in those patients.

The results, presented at two major conferences in the past six months, were significant with nearly 35 percent of the cases being impacted by the Web conferencing, including 16 patients who received follow up care based on the findings.

As a result, the medical center now has weekly pathology/radiology breast conferences that readdress cases and issue in a time and cost-effective way that further enhances patient care.

But equally exciting from a medical standpoint is that the project could help clear the way for worldwide teleconferences for team diagnoses or second opinions.

“We are quickly developing the technology that will allow pathologists to sit in their office and advise a doctor or even surgeon anywhere in the world. For us, maybe that means a doctor in Salina or Great Bend wants a second opinion before surgery. They could consult with us and we could give them our professional opinion while we both review the same slides at the same time,” Tawfik said. “With more medical care being carried out in rural areas, this might be our best option to provide pathology and radiology expertise to those areas.”