The PathLAKE conference held in March 2021 saw project partners, associate members and advisory group members gather together to share ideas, stimulate conversation and introduce challenge in a safe environment, helping to shape the ongoing project development.
The PathLAKE project is one of a network of five centres of Excellence in digital pathology and medical imaging, supported by a £50million investment from the UK Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.
The virtual conference began with an in-depth presentation on each of the four Exemplar projects. As well as updates, comment, challenge and discussion, input was invited from the partners to help inform ongoing AI development for each Exemplar.
The Advisory Group session focused on the benefits of open versus closed data and opportunities for linking with other data sets. The group was particularly interested in the education workstream of the project, and the Beat the Pathologist competition which takes the principles of digital pathology and turns them into a computer game-based competition aimed at school children.
The day concluded with a fascinating session delivered by Professor Manuel Salto-Tellez and Professor Nasir Rajpoot on œNew wet- and dry-lab development and the future of PathLAKE. The talk reviewed interesting developments in tissue-hybridisation technologies and in-silico analysis of images, and opened up a discussion on potential new avenues for the PathLAKE consortium.
Professor David Snead, Director of PathLAKE and Professor of Pathology at UHCW NHS Trust said: œFollowing the postponement of our planned face-to-face conference due to COVID-19, we were delighted to finally get the conference underway virtually.
It was good to have a full consortium meeting where we could share project progress amongst partners and also review and learn from one another. We had some extremely good and constructive discussions which are vital in feeding into the ongoing project.
The next PathLAKE conference will be taking place alongside the Cirdan Pathology Horizons conference in September 2021. More information will be available on this shorty.
