The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology
With support of a $10,000,00 gift from The Warren Alpert Foundation, The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was established in 2017 as an innovation center to facilitate novel research and development in digital pathology and algorithmic computational pathology for clinical cancer care and research. It also serves as a hub for existing digital pathology efforts to establish a fully digital workflow in MSK’s Department of Pathology. The Alpert Center positions MSK as a major center for pathology digital imaging and computational pathology, providing a key component to the institutional focus on precision medicine. Though several other major institutions have begun programs in machine learning, digital pathology, or advanced imaging, few, if any, have encompassed all of these disciplines in a synergistic relationship with other clinical and basic disciplines as proposed by the Department of Pathology at MSK.
Digital pathology involves the conversion of tissue samples from glass slides to digital images, improving diagnostic efficiency while providing an infrastructure for computational pathology, which is based on quantitative measurement, mathematical modeling, and the development of algorithms for machine learning. This, in turn, can enhance the interpretation of disease processes and allow for the integration of genetic and clinical information with the morphometric analysis, offering a higher level of understanding of tumor pathology. Implementing a fully digital workflow will allow this enhancement in diagnosis through computer-augmented diagnostic algorithms and decision-support systems.