The most widely accepted and used type of digital pathology (DP) is whole-slide imaging (WSI). The USFDA granted two WSI system approvals for primary diagnosis, the first in 2017. In Latin America, DP has the potential to reshape healthcare by enhancing diagnostic capabilities through artificial intelligence (AI) and standardizing pathology reports. Yet, we must tackle regulatory hurdles, training, resource availability, and unique challenges to the region. Collectively addressing these hurdles can enable the region to harness DP's advantages-enhancing disease diagnosis, medical research, and healthcare accessibility for its population. Americas Health Foundation assembled a panel of Latin American pathologists who are experts in DP to assess the hurdles to implementing it into pathologists' workflows in the region and provide recommendations for overcoming them. Some key steps recommended include creating a Latin American Society of Digital Pathology to provide continuing education, developing AI models trained on the Latin American population, establishing national regulatory frameworks for protecting the data, and standardizing formats for DP images to ensure that pathologists can collaborate and validate specimens across the various DP platforms.
Competing Interests: The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Renata Coudry, Emilio Assis, Fernando Frasetto, Angela Jansen, Leonard da Silva, Rafael Parra-Medina, Mauro Saieg reports financial support was provided by Americas Health Foundation. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(© 2024 The Authors.)