We reviewed the role of telemedicine in multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings, which play an important role in the provision of effective and tailored patient care in diverse clinical settings. This article is based on conducted search in PubMed. Search terms included “telemedicine,” “multidisciplinary team,” and “(telemedicine) and (multidisciplinary team).” Telemedicine provides an important advantage in the provision of MDT meeting comparing with traditional settings. Those include improved access to and collaboration of medical experts. This resulted in increased levels of medical competence and improved provisions of diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up to patients irrespective of location.

Background: Pancreatic cystic lesions are often challenging entities for diagnosis and management. EUS-FNA diagnostic accuracy is limited by paucicellularity of cytology specimens and sampling errors. Needle-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (nCLE) provides real-time imaging of the microscopic structure of the cystic lesion and could result in a more accurate diagnosis. Aims and Objectives: To determine the diagnostic utility of in vivo nCLE and EUS-FNA in the diagnosis and histologic characterization of pancreatic cystic lesions (PCL). Materials and Methods: All patients diagnosed with PCL who had undergone nCLE and FNA over a 10-year period within a major urban teaching hospital were included in this study. All gastroenterology reports of the nCLE images and corresponding pathologist findings from the EUS-FNA were collected and compared with, a final diagnosis prospectively collected from clinicopathological and imaging data. Results: A total of n=32 patients were included in this study, which consisted of n=13 serous cystadenoma (SCA), n=7 intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMN), n=2 mucinous cystic neoplasms (MCN), n=3 well-differentiated neuroendocrine tumors, n=2 cysts, n=2 benign pancreatic lesions, n=1 adenocarcinoma, n=1 gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) and n=1 lymphangioma. The overall diagnostic rate was higher in nCLE (87.5%) vs. EUS-FNA (71.9%) While the diagnostic accuracy of nCLE and EUS-FNA were comparable in characterization of benign vs. malignant lesions, the nCLE diagnosis demonstrated higher accuracy rate in identifying mucinous cystic neoplasms compared to EUS-FNA. Conclusion: nCLE is a useful companion diagnostic tool for pancreatic cystic lesions and could assist the cytopathologist to better triage the sample for required ancillary testing and treatment planning. The combination of nCLE and EUS-FNA may be especially helpful in reducing the proportion of cases categorized as non-diagnostic.

Since the advent of whole slide imaging, the utility of digitized slides for education in medical school and residency has been amply documented. Pathology departments at most major academic medical centers have made digitized slides available to pathology residents for study, even before the use of digitized slides for clinical purposes (i.e., primary diagnosis) has become commonplace. This article describes the experience of one academic medical center with the storage and indexing of large volumes of digitized slides. Our goal was to be able to retrieve scanned slides for a variety of educational applications and thereby maximize the heuristic value of the slides. This posed a formidable challenge in terms of development and deployment of an index system that would allow exemplary slides to be identified and retrieved irrespective of the purpose for which the slide was scanned. We used the structure inherent in Aperio's image management software (eSlide Manager) to build an educational database that allowed each image to be appended with a unique taxonomic identifier so that the individual files could be retrieved in a flexible and utilitarian manner.