Cytopathology Specimen Types
Unlike surgical pathology slides, there are a variety of slide types in cytology including direct smears, cytospins, LBC slides (ThinPrep or SurePath), and cell block sections. Cytology slides can also contain very scant single cells or abundant cellular material with crowded 3D cell clusters.
Moreover, there are typically more stain methods encoun.
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Focus
Surgical pathology slides with 4–5 micron thick tissue sections have little variation topologically; therefore, scanning these slides with one Z-focus level to generate a two-dimensional (2D) WSI is generally sufficient to have almost everything in focus, except for occasional tissue folds.
In contrast, cytology slides often include thick smears an.
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How is digital imaging used in pathology?
Digital imaging is widely used by pathologists for creation of static images using microscope-dedicated optical cameras and, more recently, using smartphones [ 1 ].
The introduction of whole slide imaging (WSI) in 1999 provided the opportunity of digitally converting the entire tissue on glass slide into a high-resolution virtual slide (VS).
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How successful is whole slide imaging in cytopathology?
Whole slide imaging (WSI) success in surgical pathology is exemplified by FDA approval for primary diagnosis, development of guidelines for standardizing clinical validation and telepathology, etc. [ 1 ].
However, WSI in cytopathology has not been as pervasive [ 2, 3, 4 ].
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Magnification and Resolution
WSI with scanning at a 20x magnification usually suffices for digitizing surgical pathology slides.
However, scanning at 40x magnification is often necessary to obtain higher optical resolution in order to examine cytology slides at the cellular level.
Higher optical resolution can be further obtained by using objectives with greater numerical aper.
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Should cytology slides be scanned at 20 magnification?
Scanning at × 20 magnification is considered suitable for routine surgical pathology and immunohistochemistry slides [ 7 ].
However, the same may not hold true for cytology slides.
A study evaluating WSI in cervico-vaginal cytology reported higher diagnostic accuracy with × 40 or × 40 z-stack scanning [ 1 ].
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What is whole slide imaging (WSI)?
Whole slide imaging (WSI) allows generation of large whole slide images and their navigation with zoom in and out like a true virtual microscope.
It has become widely used in surgical pathology for many purposes, such as:
- education and training
- research activity
- teleconsultation
- primary diagnosis
