Commentary: Leveraging Edge Computing Technology for Digital Pathology

A reliable telepathology system requires responsiveness to transmit and view high‐resolution pathology images, often of large file size. Telepathology for clinical practice, therefore, requires low delays, high bandwidth, and fast image processing. Sacco et al. recently published an article entitled “On Edge Computing for Remote Pathology Consultations and Computations.”[1] This paper explains the power of edge computing technology in the field of telepathology to augment live remote microscope sessions. This group from Saint Louis in the USA developed a telepathology system called LiveMicro that facilitates remote collaboration and digital image sharing in addition to remote computation on live microscopic images. Contrary to other available telepathology solutions, by employing edge computing, their system integrates an image processing algorithm together with high‐speed data transfer with a latency on the order of hundreds of milliseconds.[2] In addition to allowing remote control of microscopic images, this innovative system also provides benefits such as performing application‐specific image processing and speeding up image transmission time, unlike other traditional cloud‐based systems often plagued by bottlenecks from networks with high traffic.