Data Storing in Digital Pathology and Dermatopathology: Volume and Costs

• This article is about the situation in Andalusia, Spain. However it is a case example which will be useful for the reader terms of replication and scaling up.
• In public hospitals in Andalusia, there are 36 pathology departments:
  • There are more than 400,000 slides being generated yearly in Seville, a bit less in Halva (100,000)…In the region, that amounts to almost two million slides per year in our region !
  • One quarter of histopathology is derived from skin procedure.
  • 17% of all paraffin blocks concern Dermatopathology. Thus, close to a fifth of all the work in pathology is Dermatopathology.
• It’s a lot of slides and to be able to store them, storage needs to be planned and structured (see figure below)
  • The first one is the to a step is through a high performance storage that allow us to integrate about 250,000 slides with a fast loading and performance capability.
  • The second step is one of lesser performance but higher storage capacity. This permanent storage solution will grow every year significantly.

Is storage too expensive ?

• In Andalusia, cost every year to digitize and store slides (this requires high resolution) is around one million Euros every year.
  • This amounts to 12 million Euros in 10 years.
• Advances in storage capabilities (Moore’s law) brings costs down over time: This is essentially because the cost of storage is decreases around 15% every year, at least in the last 10 years.

• Note that 1 Peta byte is an astounding 10e15 bytes or 1000 Terabytes or one million Gigabytes !
• Each digital slide has a size of around 5 GB.

Marcial Garcia-Rojo, MD. Teledermatopathology. 8th World Congress of Teledermatology, Skin Imaging and AI in Skin diseases – November 2020