Objectives: Bone marrow evaluation plays a critical role in the diagnosis, staging, and monitoring of many diseases. Although there are standardized guidelines for assessing bone marrow specimen quality, there is a lack of evidence-based tools to perform such assessments. The objective was to monitor bone marrow sample quality in real time by standardizing the basic components of a synoptic report and incorporating it into a bone marrow report template. Materials and Methods: A relational database of bone marrow quality parameters was developed and incorporated into our laboratory information system bone marrow report template, with data entry completed during specimen sign out. Data from multiple reports created within a date range were extracted by Structured Query Language query, and summarized in tabular form. Reports generated from these data were utilized in quality improvement efforts. Results: The synoptic reporting system was routinely used to record the quality of bone marrow specimens from adult patients. Data from 3189 bone marrow aspirates, 3302 biopsies, and 3183 biopsy touch imprints identified hemodilution as the principal issue affecting bone marrow aspirate quality, whereas aspiration artifact and fragmentation affected bone marrow biopsy quality. Conclusions: The bone marrow synoptic reporting process was easy to use, readily adaptable, and has proved a useful component of the overall quality assurance process to optimize bone marrow quality.

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging is increasingly being incorporated into a variety of medical specialties: surgery and radiology being but two prominent examples. Image-intensive disciplines, such as anatomic pathology (AP), represent excellent potential candidates for further exploration of this innovative technology. Multiple potential use cases exist within AP, involving patient care, education, and research. These use cases broadly include direct utilization of the 3D digital assets for viewing on a 2D screen, populating 3D extended reality platforms (virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality) as well as generation of 3D printed photorealistic specimen models. Herein, these use cases are explored with specific regard to our experiences and yet unrealized potential. Future directions and considerations are also discussed.

Background: Adoption of the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard for whole slide images (WSIs) has been slow, despite significant time and effort by standards curators. One reason for the lack of adoption is that there are few tools which exist that can meet the requirements of WSIs, given an evolving ecosystem of best practices for implementation. Eventually, vendors will conform to the specification to ensure enterprise interoperability, but what about archived slides? Millions of slides have been scanned in various proprietary formats, many with examples of rare histologies. Our hypothesis is that if users and developers had access to easy to use tools for migrating proprietary formats to the open DICOM standard, then more tools would be developed as DICOM first implementations. Methods: The technology we present here is dicom_wsi, a Python based toolkit for converting any slide capable of being read by the OpenSlide library into DICOM conformant and validated implementations. Moreover, additional postprocessing such as background removal, digital transformations (e.g., ink removal), and annotation storage are also described. dicom_wsi is a free and open source implementation that anyone can use or modify to meet their specific purposes. Results: We compare the output of dicom_wsi to two other existing implementations of WSI to DICOM converters and also validate the images using DICOM capable image viewers. Conclusion: dicom_wsi represents the first step in a long process of DICOM adoption for WSI. It is the first open source implementation released in the developer friendly Python programming language and can be freely downloaded at https:// github.com/Steven N Hart/dicom_wsi.