The design of a health technology assessment system in telepathology.

Up to a few years ago, the management of the information on the slides (virtual slides) in telepathology applications was principally based on the design and construction of a few identical and expensive platforms with microscope units and software tools for the display and for electronic control (zooming, moving, and cutting of images). The development of information technology tools allows the diffusion of new visualization strategies and the availability of low cost or free visualization proprietary tools. New competitive systems such as client-server architectures are available in telepathology today. The investigation of the new technologies for telepathology is a basic and core aspect in telemedicine technology assessment. A new interactive environment to investigate the health technology assessment of a telepathology system has been studied. In particular, in consideration of previous experience the methodology focused both on the senior pathologist and younger student pathologist. Two interactive forms were created by a working group: a feedback form and a diagnostic form. The first was designed to investigate the technology characteristics and acceptance of the telepathology systems. The second tool was designed to investigate the diagnostic accuracy on a significant sample of virtual slides by two different groups of pathologists (senior and younger students). The acceptance of the methodology was very high.