Development time 6 months

Work session with Biopsy Assistant begins with authentication. The splash screen illustrates the field of application.

BA provides a way to track biopsy specimens in medical labs at all stages, from specimen requisition to actual test and report compilation with snapshots of the biopsy specimens.

Processed requisitions are displayed as a list of work items in the program's main window. The list may contain either all work items, or those at a particular stage of processing. So, each user of BA sees only those requisitions that he or she is responsible for.

The main window of the application displays the list of the processed requisitions with detailed data for each of the items. Button panel for available operations is positioned on the left side. Specimens data for Worksheet Data Input Wizard is displayed in the lower right area.

BA allows several simultaneous users on the following scheme:

• Clerk registers all arriving requisitions in BA, thus creating work items.
• Pathologist examines a specimen with a microscope attached to a digital camera, and takes snapshots from BA. The specimen snapshots are immediately bound to the work items and are shown in the pathology report.Pathologist records results of the test into the electronic worksheet or on paper.
• Clerk enters results of the test from the paper worksheet into BA, and if applicable, prints out a report for the attending physician.
• Administrator supervises work items processing, controls access to BA by assigning IDs and passwords, and assigns user roles that authorize access to certain operations.

Window of preliminary page view of pathology report displays the printer-ready page layout. The page contains description for the specimen(s), microscopic snapshots, and diagnosis.

All basic operations: requisition registration, electronic biopsy images, and worksheet data entering are done in BA through wizards that guide the user step-by-step through work item processing. At the same time, previous data correction and editing, and rollback to previous stages of processing are possible through work item properties dialog.

To allow use of existing data BA supports importing data from other systems via text files, such as Comma Separated Values (CSV) files.