ASCP 2019: The Art of Data Science in Pathology

By Amron E. Obstfeld, MD, PhD, and Stephan Kadauke, MD, PhD

More than any other field of medicine, pathology generates and is guided by data. These data are the fuel that drives clinical decision-making, laboratory operation, and quality management. More recently, these data have been leveraged to find a path towards precision medicine.

However, pathologists involved in data analysis face numerous challenges. Data must be acquired from disparate databases, cleaned, and rendered into a tidy format for analysis; also, statistical models must be used in conjunction with plotting to gain insights. This all must be performed in a reproducible and transparent manner so that the conclusions will be accepted by decision-makers.

In our session, “The Art of Data Science in Pathology” that we’ll present on September 11 at the ASCP 2019 Annual Meeting, we’ll introduce the subject and key concepts of data science, an interdisciplinary convergence of statistics, scripted analysis, and domain expertise, as applied to pathology practice. We'll motivate participants to adopt the best practices of data science by providing examples in which ignoring those best practices have led to false claims, reputational ruin, and patient harm.

The different forms of data analysis will be introduced and compared. We will then list and define the practices used in data science that enable analyses to be dependably reproducible. Next, we'll introduce an emerging 'grammar' of data analysis, which involves a series of concisely described key components of an analytical project. We will then apply these concepts to one or more practical analytical challenges faced in pathology.

It's our hope that attendees will come away with a clearer understanding of the potential consequences of poor analytical practice in pathology, be able to list the data-science practices that lead to reliable analyses, and appreciate the grammar of data analysis.

Stephan Kadauke, MD, PhD, is the assistant director of the Cell and Gene Therapy Laboratory at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Amrom Obstfeld, MD, PhD, is director of the Hematology and Coagulation Laboratories at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics faculty.