ECDP23 @ Budapest

Dear Travel Diary….

The European Congress on Digital Pathology 2023 (ECDP23) took place in Budapest, Hungary, from June 14th-17th in the beautiful Corinthian Hotel. ~600 delegates shared their latest experiences and scientific insights on Digital Pathology & AI.

The large ballroom is certainly a special venue. The industry exhibition as well as the poster session takes place in two adjacent exhibition halls.

What’s new?

• Olympus / Evident is launching their new slide scanner for diagnostics SLIDEVIEW DX.
• Roche is showing their (not so brand new anymore) DP600.
• The EMPAIA project will end in a few months, but their efforts for a modular and interoperable scanner + IMS + AI landscape will be continued in the newly founded EMPAIA International e.V. (non-profit registered association).
• Newly founded Univ. Warwick spin-out histofy, by well-known names Nasir Rajpoot, David Snead & Simon Graham, is showing their platform.

Fraunhofer IIS literally in the center of Digital Pathology

We are glad to announce that we are now literally in the center of digital pathology — at least according to our logo’s position on the exhibitor wall.

The Fraunhofer IIS team has launched a brand new MIKAIA version 1.3.0 at the ECDP23. We’re also giving sneak previews of the next version already to an interested audience of (digitial) pathologists, in particular about the upcoming “Plug in your own AI” App that will enable AI creators to plug in their AIs into MIKAIA and this way enable them to share their AI with fellow pathologists. After all, most pathologists do not work on a Linux laptop with a Python developer environment, and are willing to use the command line terminal 😉

Danube river boat trip

Similar to last year’s trip on the Spree in Berlin, ESDIP has again planned a boat trip as a social event, taking place on Friday night. A good crowd of delegates signed up and was transported to the port by buses. The boat departed at 7 pm and returned at 10 pm. After having drinks on the boat’s roof deck, everyone went downstairs into the restaurant.

In a short ceremony the best abstract, best poster, and Semicol challenge winner teams were awarded. As 3DHISTECH sponsored the trip, their charismatic CEO Bela Molnar then took the stage, welcomed everyone, and explained briefly how they came to name their scanner “Pannorammic”. After he opened the buffet, it was a nice touch of him going from table to table and personally offering Hungarian Palinka schnaps to everyone who was up for it.

The trip was kindly sponsored by Hungarian scanner vendor 3DHISTECH

Sweets, sweets, sweets

Also, similar to previous years, ECDP truely has become a health hazard to both delegates and exhibitors: cappucino machines, snacks, lunch, pastries, cakes, snacks again, open bar, … are served in between sessions. ESDIP / ECDP certainly know how to host the community and take care of their well being.

Most humourous & provoking poster

The poster by Pohjonen et al. surely stood out at the poster exhibition. It addresses an important challenge that any AI developer who intends on deploying their model “into the wild” needs to face and solve. And it does so with Finnish humor. Read for yourself: