almost a year has passed since the last issue of Trillium – Digitale Pathologie, and many things have changed, both internally and in the pathology world.
Internally, we are thrilled to widen our audience to the English-speaking community. Especially in the dynamic field of digital and computational pathology, in which innovations arise quickly and world-wide, we can learn a lot from each other when language barriers are lowered. We therefore also changed the title of the Journal to Trillium – Pathology.
Further, we established our first scientific advisory board (SAB), helping shape the journal format by proposing relevant topics and leading authors and by advising on the general structure for the next issues. The SAB will meet online two times per year (next date after ECDP 2023), and still welcomes interested and motivated members. Feel free to join us if you want to be part of our new journal for digital and computational pathology!
Our team of free journalists has changed as well! Victoria Stettner, who was greatly in charge of our first German issue last year, moved on to new opportunities. We thank Victoria endlessly for her immense commitment and wish her all the best for her next steps in her career! At the same time, we are extremely excited to welcome Julietta Jupe in our editorial team, and we are looking forward to working with her and making Trillium – Pathology a success!
Further, Prof. Dr. Peter Wild, our former Co-Chief-Editor, is now a SAB member and will contribute from there to our forthcoming editions. I cannot express my gratitude enough for his help in the last and current edition and to have him aboard.
In October 2021, Trillium organized an Oncosymposium at the Munich Leukemia Laboratories, Germany, discussing ways from biomarkers to personalized therapies. Digital and computational pathology were of course highly discussed and recognized as important elements in this research.
This brings us to external changes during the last year. Artificial intelligence (AI) currently experiences a summer of popularity, not only in pathology but also in the general public, with the advent of fascinating large language models such as ChatGPT. And it would of course be interesting to see such systems explain medical images and do medical conversations as well (assuming they are accurate). But in clinical routine, AI models are still far away from reality. Or am I wrong? Like a few years ago, when the first labs reported successful transition of their routine to a digital pathology workflow, we today read first reports about laboratories that do their experience with AI for clinical routine! We include such reports in this issue and are extremely excited to learn from these pioneers to adopt AI for different use cases in pathology.
Speaking of adoption: Although pathology AI is finally broadly available, many labs have not transitioned to digital workflows, yet. While the number of digital labs is steadily increasing, there are still many hurdles to be solved for digital transition, two of which being common standards and software interfaces. The diverse file formats, vendor-specific ways to integrate into laboratory information systems (LIS) and different viewer software are always open questions that need to be addressed. Changing a well-established LIS is cumbersome and time consuming. The need of standards in digital pathology is therefore as high as never before, and we include in this issue a point of view of the German Digital Pathology Commission on that topic.
We hope you enjoy this year’s edition of Trillium – Pathology and encourage you to contribute to our next issue with experience reports, own opinions, original research, mini-reviews or other topic requests – just contact or join us!