Test Drives

THANKS TO DIGITISATION, PATHOLOGY IS NOW GOING BEYOND JUST DIAGNOSIS AND IS HELPING IN PROGNOSIS AND TREATMENT, TOO

- Pooja Biraia Jaiswal

PATHOLOGY IS CONSIDERED to be the ‘doctrine of diseases’. It is a specialisation that deals with laboratory examination, analysis and testing of samples of body tissues and fluids, thereby enabling doctors and clinicians to diagnose the patient accurately and prescribe treatment accordingly.

“In India, it is only now that we are taking off from conventional pathology to the new generation pathology that is practised in the west, which is largely based on personalised medicine,” says Dr G.S.K. Velu, chairman and managing director, Trivitron Group of Companies, which is based in Chennai. “Going forward, pathology will not just be a support function anymore, which is primarily used for diagnosis; it will be applied equally to prognosis as well as treatment.” Also, technology will help widen the range of home testing kits, moving beyond glucose testing to include profile testing like cardiac and lipid profile, he says.

The three big technological leaps in recent years, say experts, have been the focus on personalised medicine, genomics (which includes pharmacogenomics) and molecular diagnostics. “Though these are complicated advancements, their execution will depend on a healthy partnership between clinicians and lab technicians,” says Velu.

To put it simply, it is the digitisation of pathology across its multiple branches—including haematology, histopathology, clinical biochemistry, immunology and microbiology— which aims to simplify the process of lab testing and diagnosis, reduce timelines by a huge margin and give results that are more accurate than ever before.