COVID-19 Worldwide Digital Repository
Organized by the Alliance Standards Working Group
Lead: Markus Herrmann (MGH), Amanda Lowe (Visiopharm), Matt Leavitt (LUMEA), Ian Cree (WHO), Brandon Gallas (FDA), Steve Hewitt (NIH), Alain Borczuk (Weill Cornell)
A major challenge of COVID-19 is our current lack of understanding of the key pathobiological principles of the disease in the most severe cases. A central histopathological repository of these tragic cases from various countries does not yet exist, but would be essential in gaining an understanding of the disease and establishing diagnostic criteria. The CDC is already aligning the collection of biomaterials. The Alliance plans to establish an international virtual platform for hosting and sharing digital whole slide images of lung specimens of COVID-19 cases. This Alliance project is a collaboration between the pre-analytic, data standards and ground truth working groups. It aims to apply a standardized specimen preparation protocol and use an international ISO standard for communication of digital images and related information to ensure digital slides can be interpreted reliably and compared across institutions. As a proof of principle, the goal is to establish a standard data repository of digital images of postmortem lung specimens together with relevant metadata and make these data sets available to pathologists and scientists around the world.
For those who missed our Wednesday, April 22, 2020 webinar, you can get the slides here.
We are still working to gather insights from institutions and/or pathologists across the globe that are processing COVID-19 tissue specimens and/or performing autopsies. We created a very brief survey that helps us with this. The survey is available HERE. We’d much appreciate your support in sending the survey out to your network. The initial results of the survey are in the webinar slides.
Read the full call-to-action letter here: Call-to-action Letter
Access the survey here: Survey
To access COVID-19 Worldwide Digital Slide Repository, click here: (TBD)
If you have any images (gross, whole slide image, radiology, etc.) that you would like to share, please let us know. Thank you!
Contact: data-repository@digitalpathologyalliance.org
Autopsy Resources
Articles
COVID-19 Autopsies, Oklahoma, USA
Guidelines
CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/guidance-postmortem-specimens.html