by Christos Evangelou, MSc, PhD – Medical Writer and Editor
Researchers in France conducted a modeling study to estimate the carbon footprint of going fully digital in surgical pathology. The study showed that a hypothetical 100% digital pathology scenario at the national scale could increase a typical lab’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 8%, even without the use of AI to analyze the digitized slides.
The study was published in Pathology.
Study Rationale
Like much of Europe, France is actively funding the digitization of surgical pathology infrastructure. However, the carbon cost of digitization has remained uncertain. A research team led by Dr. Cyprien Tilmant of the Groupement of Hospitals of the Catholic Institute of Lille (GHICL) and colleagues across France formed the TEAP collective (Transformation Ecologique de l’Anatomie et Cytologie Pathologiques) to assess the environmental impact of digitization in pathology.
“The digitization of our specialty is accelerating rapidly, driven by public funding in France, but this digitization requires significant investment in equipment that is particularly energy-intensive and consumes precious mineral resources,” Tilmant said. “It was therefore urgent to conduct an environmental impact assessment and establish recommendations before too many poor decisions were made.”
Methodology
The team modeled what would happen if all 250 public and private surgical pathology laboratories in France […]
![Figure 1: Fine-tuning improves robustness and performance jointly. Each foundation model is shown before (open circle) and after (filled circle) fine-tuning. The x-axis is the average PathoROB robustness index over three datasets, where higher values indicate greater robustness; the y-axis is the normalized rank sum over the HEST, THUNDER and Patho-Bench benchmarks, rescaled to [0, 1] so that 1 corresponds to the best achievable performance.](https://www.pathologynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/embedding-figure-800x600-1.png)
