For years, the promise of digital pathology was simple: move the glass to a monitor and everything speeds up. The reality turned out to be much more complicated. Some of the earliest clinical studies found that pathologists reading whole slide images were actually slower than they were at the microscope, in some cases meaningfully so. Screen rendering lagged, panning and zooming felt clumsy, and the digital tools didn’t replace the quick, practiced movements of a hand on a microscope stage. Going digital, on its own, didn’t make anyone faster.
That history matters, because it points to where the real bottleneck lives. The microscope was never the slow part. The slow part is everything around the diagnosis: receiving and sorting slides, checking them against the information system, marking regions by hand, estimating measurements, and dictating findings into a separate system.
In a traditional twelve-core prostate biopsy case, that means handling twelve individual slides and repeating the same manual choreography twelve times before a word of the report is written. Studies of analog workflows have found that the time actually spent looking at tissue accounts for only about three-fifths of a pathologist’s working session. The rest goes to the handling, the paperwork, and the context-switching.
Slide digitization and online workflows alone don’t remove that friction, but integration does.
Consolidating the case before it reaches the screen
The first place Lumea addresses workflow friction is upstream of the pathologist entirely. Using the BxChip®, up to six biopsy cores can be multiplexed in a single block with clear indication markings to tell the cores apart. The tissue-mimetic material keeps cores intact and oriented instead of twisting or fragmenting. In practice, that consolidates a standard twelve-core prostate case from twelve separate slides down to two. This solution alone enables an 83% reduction in the amount of slides that have to be labeled, scanned, loaded, and reviewed.
Every slide removed is a handling step removed, a scan removed, and other manual tasks removed.
Building the report as you read
The second place Lumea creates greater efficiency is during the sign-out itself. Rather than alternating between the image, a paper requisition, and a separate dictation screen, the relevant clinical history and the diagnostic fields sit together in one workspace. Circle a region of cancer on the screen and Lumea’s software calculates core involvement directly, so the report takes shape as the case is read instead of being reconstructed afterward from memory and slide numbers or transcription.
When the workflow is built this way, the efficiency penalty that slowed down early digital adoption stops.
What the real-world data shows
Across thousands of real-world twelve-core prostate biopsy cases read on the Lumea platform, the median sign-out time is approximately ten minutes, and the mean sign-out time is eight minutes.
Sign-out times will always fluctuate with case complexity, a pathologist’s experience, and where a practice sits in its digital transition. Pathologists will naturally gain speed as they settle in. The ten-minute benchmark reflects prostate-focused readers working within a stabilized workflow, which is precisely the environment the platform is engineered to create.
Pathologists who have made the switch describe it in plainer terms. Dr. Todd Randolph, who shared his experience with us, said a typical twelve-core prostate case on glass took him up to twenty to twenty-five minutes. On Lumea’s digital pathology platform, he describes the same cases as taking approximately half the time. His numbers represent a general anecdote about his experience, but they line up with what the workflow is built to do: take the same diagnostic work and strip out the steps that never needed a pathologist in the first place.
Not just digital pathology: a diagnostic suite
Speeding up the read is the most visible benefit, but it points at something larger. Once slides, patient identity, reporting, and the diagnostic fields all live in one workspace, there is room to bring the rest of the case in, too. That is the difference between digital pathology and a digital diagnostic suite.
Molecular testing is the clearest example. On most platforms, ordering a send-out means leaving the case to enter a separate portal with another login and initiate manual hand-offs between the clinic, the lab, and the pathologist. Lumea puts that ordering inside the viewer, where the pathologist is already reading, so the send-out becomes part of reading the case rather than a separate task someone has to remember. Physicians can set criteria ahead of time, so when a patient qualifies, the right test is queued and routed automatically instead of depending on someone to act in the moment.
Keeping everything in one place is also safer. When a single patient’s case is split across multiple systems and logins, every extra window is one more place for something to be transposed, mismatched, or missed. Consolidating ordering, slides, identity, and reporting removes those manual checkpoints and the errors that can hide within them.
Lumea’s tech also contributes to a 2.1x reduction in test cancellations from QNS (Quantity Not Sufficient) and RNA degradation. And, molecular turnaround times for practices on the platform are cut by roughly half. More patients get the result their care depends on, sooner.
The open AI marketplace sits in the same place. One-touch assistance handles percent-involvement calculations and grade mapping directly in the reporting screen, so the tools support the read without becoming another window to manage.
None of this is an IMS with extras or an LIS with add-ons. It’s one connected workspace where slides, molecular ordering, AI, and reporting are linked from the start rather than stitched together after the fact. With an integrated system, you can see which send-outs are available through the platform and add new partners without changing systems.
The point isn’t the monitor
The lesson we’ve learned after working for over a decade in digital pathology tech is that the screen alone was never going to be the main catalyst for faster sign-outs. Efficiency comes from removing the manual steps that surround the diagnosis, from the slides that no longer need to exist to the report that doesn’t have to be dictated twice. When sign-out for a complex, twelve-core case lands near ten minutes, those recovered minutes compound across a caseload into hours of additional capacity that can go back to patients, to complex consultations, and to the kind of work that truly needs a pathologist’s attention.
The same integration that creates that time savings is what carries the rest of the case information with it. Molecular ordering, AI assistance, and the final report stay connected to the slide rather than scattered across separate systems, so a case moves from biopsy to sign-out in one continuous path.
That is what a digital diagnostic suite is for. Not a faster microscope, and not digital pathology alone, but a shorter path from tissue to answer.
See the full workspace in action. Schedule a Lumea demo and watch how slides, molecular ordering, and reporting work together in one sign-out.
