Beyond innovation - how to embrace responsibility and leadership in digital pathology at a personal and national level w/ Inti Zlobec

Today is the International Women's Day and this month at the Digital Pathology Podcast I decided to invite some incredible women who are leaders in the digital pathology field.

Today's guest, Inti Zlobec is a professor of Digital Pathology at the University of Bern. Inti is now leading the digital pathology branch of the Institute for Tissue Medicine and Pathology, where she bridges the gap between pathologists, computer scientists, and data scientists. She also serves as the president of the Swiss Digital Pathology Consortium. The institute's name was changed to emphasize the dynamism in pathology and its links to various other domains.

Her background is in statistics and computational research combined with a PhD in experimental pathology at the University of McGill in Canada. Combining and hybridizing those two fields has been a blessing for her in bringing people with different backgrounds together. Bothe her background and personality make here a natural connector of all digital pathology links.
 
A crucial part of this linkage is removal of the intimidation factor associated with pathologists.  Instead the focus should be on acquiring the necessary level of knowledge for collaboration. It's important to involve pathologists in the projects early and give them them a sense of contribution to foster a productive collaboration. 

Pathologists should not just be used for annotations and quick checks, but should be included in projects as equal contributors.

In addition to Inti's University appointment she also is the president of the Swiss Digital Pathology Consortium (SDPath).
 
In 2018, a group of three professionals (Inti included:) in Switzerland founded the Swiss Digital Pathology Initiative (SDPI) to promote digital pathology and exchange knowledge. The initiative grew to over 140 members, and in 2021, SDPI collaborated with the Swiss Personalized Health Network to build a digital pathology network across Switzerland.

The goal of SDPI is to harmonize and structure data by scanning cases, attaching a minimum set of variables to images, and using standardized hardware and formats. This network will allow researchers and industry partners to access virtual cohorts of patients for clinical trials, and the harmonized data sets can also help boost pharmaceutical development.

This would be the first initiative of this kind at a national level which will create a fantastic model for others to tweak and follow.

As a female in science in general and in the digital pathology field specifically, she has been fortunate to be surrounded by people who value her ideas and ideas of others, regardless of their gender. The gender gap in this field is still noticeable, particularly in more senior positions, which affects the number of female role models. Often insecurity can prevent some women from advancing,  but exposure,  experience and dedicated work on overcoming your own limitations will help. And so will involvement in initiatives such as SDPI. 

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