Slide scanners in district hospitals wired to pathologists anywhere
Many countries have one pathologist per million people. Putting a slide scanner in each district lab and sending images to a pooled group of pathologists could give a cancer diagnosis in days instead of months.
The bottleneck for cancer diagnosis in much of Africa and South Asia is the pathologist, not the tissue sample. Whole-slide scanners now cost a fraction of what they did, and pathology images travel well. A national or regional network would standardise tissue processing at district labs, scan every slide, route to a shared roster of pathologists (including diaspora volunteers and partner institutions), and track turnaround time as the primary metric. Several pilot networks exist; the gap is scale and sustainable financing.
- Most of the world has almost no cancer care · Seven in ten cancer deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy, pathology, surgery and drugs are scarce.
- Not enough oncologists, nurses, pathologists, physicists · The number of people with cancer is rising faster than the workforce trained to treat them.
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