Name
Interactive Case based pathology learning utilizing whole slide images enhances pathology visibility for undergraduate medical education
Date & Time
Saturday, January 25, 2020, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Carl McGary
Description

These are: Foundations of Medicine, Skin/Musculoskeletal Medicine, Neurological Medicine, Immunology-HematologyOncology, Cardiovascular-Respiratory-Renal-Acid-Base I and II, Gastrointestinal System, and Hormonal and Reproductive Medicine.  Over the last ~10 years pathology content has been in a traditional didactic lecture format without a gross or microscopic lab component. The only histopathology visual content for the undergraduate medical students(UGMS) was still digital images presented in lecture slides. One draw-back of still images is  limitations in examining distribution and extent of disease at a range of magnifications that can be more easily appreciated in larger sections.  In addition to learning about extent and distribution of disease, we feel exploration of virtual slides assists understanding the morphologic variation present for a given diagnosis.  Whole slide imaging and virtual microscopy (VM) were introduced to the UGMS in 2019 to integrate active pathology education into the problem based learning (PBL) component in Neurological Medicine.  We are currently exploring VM in other courses and formats.  The U of MN application for storing and managing large digital educational files is “Elevator” which runs on top of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem for servers, storage, and database. The platform we use for viewing whole slide images was also designed at the U of MN and is built on top of an open source project called “Leaflet”, which is similar to Google Maps.  Rather than feeding it map tiles, we break images into thousands of small pieces for different zoom levels, and load those.  All of the software is open source.  “Elevator” is at https://github.com/UMN-LATIS/elevator and the specific slide annotation tool is on GitHub at https://github.com/UMN-LATIS/leaflet-annotation.   The VM viewer is embedded thus students are not required to download software to their personal devices to read the clinical case and explore the virtual slide. We utilized the virtual slide format in traditional didactic lectures, and in active learning sessions such as peer instruction and PBL and these will be demonstrated in the workshop.  The cases selected represent common entities for UGMS based on recently published national standards and learning objectives, are in a clinical history format supporting case based interactive pathology education.  The cases include links to normal histology slides for direct comparison, as well as links to educational cases published in Academic Pathology, when available.  Student feed-back is consistent with increased pathology visibility and includes comments such as “I never thought I would like pathology but you made it clear and interesting”, & “Going in I did not enjoy pathology, but I was pleasantly surprised that I not only understood what was being taught but also enjoyed it”.  In this workshop we will demonstrate features of this system, how it has been utilized on our campus, and how it has improved our students experience in pathology.

Session Type
Workshop