The use of virtual microscopy and a wiki in pathology education: Tracking student use, involvement, and response

BACKGROUND: The pathology laboratory course at the New York College of Podiatric Medicine involves the use of Virtual Microscopy. The students can scan the whole slide, section by section, and zoom in or out. METHODS: Using the advantages of digital pathology, the students can, in addition, access the slide collections from other medical schools and put up normal histology (control) slides side-by-side with the pathology. They can cut and paste and preserve the region of interest that they find. They can edit and annotate their slides. A wiki was created (http://pathlab2014.wikifoundry.com)for the Class of 2014. The students saved, edited and uploaded their slides. In the wiki format, other students could comment, further edit, and even delete the slides. RESULTS: The students studied Basic Mechanisms and System Pathology. During this time, they saved, edited, shared, and uploaded their slides to the wiki. These were available in one full presentation and were also grouped into 16 albums. They were available to all. Student access was followed by Google analytics. At the end of the course, a questionnaire was distributed, assessing their impression of the wiki format and soliciting strengths and weaknesses. CONCLUSIONS: The use of a wiki has a number of important advantages in pathology education. It trains the students in the more sophisticated skills that they will use as professional pathologists or as clinicians: (1) Telepathology-it enables them to share slides and discuss observations. (2) Archiving and retrieval - It models the challenge faced by hospitals, diagnostic labs and physicians in maintaining a collection of slides in a form that is easily accessible. (3) Image analysis-familiarity with the wiki format allows them to jump easily to capturing and storing images found in the literature or in a pathologist's report. Experience with the use of a wiki in pathology education has been quite satisfactory from both the faculty and the student's point of view.