Emerging technologies for diagnostic pathology

Many technological advances have been made in the recent years, several of them with a great potential of significantly improving the diagnostic pathology field. This article discusses three of the most promising technologies, which emerged in the last one year. Fluorescent in situ sequencing can lead to the simultaneous identification of the transcriptome-wide RNA in individual cells across a tissue sections. 3D microscopy together with advanced image analysis can be used in diagnostic pathology and will especially be useful in hard to diagnose cases where the spatial relationship of the tissue components is important. Expansion microscopy physically expands the biological specimen, and is of great interest for diagnostic pathology since the cheap conventional microscopes can be used to image a symmetrically expanded tissue. In addition, digital analysis and computational pathology are an integral part of each of these three emerging technologies, which underline their importance for the future developments in diagnostic pathology.