Mandatory laboratory quality assurance in connection with image acquisition and analysis – the potential of virtual microscopy

Quality management is a growing issue in pathology which in turn also acts as a quality control tool in medicine. This again requires a good quality control system within the quality management in pathology laboratories. To achieve this a thorough analysis of the main pillars of defined quality and so called products of pathology labs is the first step. Further analysis has to be made on potential errors and their sources. Upon this a quality management system can be constructed to minimize the frequency and severity of occurring errors. In our analysis we describe the potential errors within the workflow of a pathology laboratory and the use of virtual microscopy in a digital pathology lab which incorporates the analysis of virtual slides into a quality management and control system with automated recovery of errors and their correction.