On Friday 1st September, prior to the European Congress of Pathology meeting, IQN Path held its 3rd In-situ Methods working group face to face meeting.
Prof Mogens Vyberg (NordiQC) and John Garratt (CIQC) chaired the session. The agenda opened with a short summary on the progress of IQN Path’s activities and discussions of the Working Group presented by Jacqueline Hall from IQN Path.
A major focus of the In-Situ Methods Working Group meeting was on the progress of the IQN Path PD-L1 digital educational portal, a concept that was born out of a discussion in the previous group meeting from the observation that the same digital slides presented to pathologists and often contain variability in the readout of the IHC test result.
Progress on the PD-L1 readout project was presented by John Garratt (CIQC) starting with an overview of the concept: to create a digital portal for self-assessment of pathologists for the readout of PD-L1 testing. A digital image management software has now been selected for use in the project. A demonstration of how the tool will be set-up was presented by Sarah Wedden (CADQAS CIC) with a focus on illustrating how the digital library and associated self-assessment questions can be implemented. IQN Path is happy to be working with CADQAS CIC and Poundbury Cancer Institute (http://poundburycancerinstitute.org/index.html) who will be supporting the technical aspects of digital library scanning, preparation and management of the digital platform software.
With a large array of EQA members and industry members represented at the meeting, a good discussion was established on some of the challenges of creating External Quality Assessment (EQA) for PD-L1 readout.
In the second half of the session IQN Path was happy to host a web-based presentation from Rafael Malagoli Rocha from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who provided a unique perspective on the current needs and challenges for Brazilian laboratories and their needs when participating in EQA.
Additional topics discussed were the interaction between ISO and External Quality Assessment, challenges for the application of ISO17043 to IHC-based schemes and the importance for reference materials for the EQA providers to run schemes as well as for laboratories as positive and negative controls.
Many thanks to all those attending and for all the interesting follow up discussions, we look forward to developing the project over the coming months.