How digitized histo­pathology training can offer advantages over microscopes

Anne Uv, professor at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Cell Biology, is responsible for teaching histology, a subject that historically only included classroom teaching and laboratory sessions. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the department suddenly had an urgent need to digitize the teaching process in order to offer students distance learning opportunities. A subscription to Sectra Education Portal allowed them to move from traditional microscopy to digitized slides.

Sectra Education Portal allows students to easily go from macro to micro. It reacts quickly when panning and zooming, and annotations can be placed exactly where needed. The move towards digitized slides ensures that slides maintain a high level of quality without degradation and allows students to access them from their own computers, which facilitates self-directed learning and promotes independence.

The teaching staff finds it reassuring to know that they can reach all students with the same information. This is difficult to achieve when using glass slides, but now they are even able to quality-assure their remote teaching.

Today, Sahlgrenska Academy uses Sectra Education Portal and two Sectra tables in their anatomy, pathology, and histology courses. The optimal user experience is achieved via a Sectra terminal, but the cloud solution has made teaching histology more flexible than before. The use of Sectra Education Portal started out as a temporary replacement for laboratory sessions. Now, it is an important complement to other teaching methodologies and is here to stay.