Telepathology in Hungary

Abstract

Histopathology service is available on-site in most of the ~80 Hungarian hospitals, however, the continuously increasing amount and sophistication of tasks have been served by a limited number (somewhat over 200) of pathologists in the last 60 years. The need for expert consultations with limited resources and staff and the enthusiasm of interested colleagues resulted in efforts for setting up and testing telepathology services. The first efforts were based on sending static histopathology images through the internet, later allowing on-line verbal and video communication between limited numbers of departments. Then a teleconsultation service was built up between 6 county hospitals, 2 university departments and a French coordinator with European support using DICOM standards and regulated data handling and protection. Recent efforts focus on using full digital slides shared on an external server (www.pathonet.com) supervised by the Hungarian Society of Pathologists, which organization initiated in cooperation with 3DHistech a large scale grant application to provide instrumentation and software tools for producing and sharing digital slides and related data for teleconsultation all over the country and beyond. © Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2009.