Weekly Scientist: C-Path: Updating the Art of Pathology

Saturday, August 18, 2012

C-Path: Updating the Art of Pathology

By Mike Martin for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute

An 84-year-old scoring technique pathologists use to diagnose and stage breast cancer is getting a 21st-century update from a computer model called Computational Pathologist (C-Path), which uses digital imagery and computer software to analyze more than 6,000 cell and tissue features faster and in more depth than the pathologist’s eye peering through a microscope.

“It would not replace human pathologists, but there are things a computer can do easier than a human,” said radiation oncologist Frances Wong, M.D., chief physician for the Fraser Valley (British Columbia) Cancer Centres. Wong did not participate in C-Path’s development, but she reviewed a study about it from research teams at Stanford, Harvard, the University of British Columbia (UBC), and the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam.

According to a study in the November 2011 Science Translational Medicine, C-path generated prognostic scores that were “strongly associated with overall survival” in 576 patients from the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) and Vancouver General Hospital (VGH).

The best histological predictors of patient survival are not from the carcinoma itself, but from adjacent stromal connective tissue. Women with worse breast cancer outcomes tended to have inflammatory and epithelial cells in distinct, thin cords infiltrating the stroma.

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About Mike Martin

A former senior science writer for United Press International, Mike Martin has written articles for Science, The Scientist, Harvard Magazine, MIT's Technology Review, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

His clients include the Epilepsy Foundation, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the California, Oregon, and Missouri university systems.

A member of the National Press Club and the National Association of Science Writers, Martin specializes in news about early-stage university and laboratory research.

He was a science journalism fellow at Duke University's National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Fall 2011, where he completed two stories about Margie Profet -- one for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and a second for Psychology Today. The latter piece led to a happy ending to her 8-year missing person story.

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