Laura Barisoni, MD, co-director of the Division of AI/Computational Pathology and newly appointed Director of the Renal Pathology Service in the Department of Pathology, has dedicated the last decade of her professional life in implementing digital pathology and image analysis to study kidney diseases. She has made significant contributions to the field of digital nephropathology, leading investigators across several consortia to establish digital pathology repositories (DPRs) and implement novel methodologies for pathology analysis in clinical research. Her leadership role has included chairing the Nephrotic Syndrome Study network (NEPTUNE) pathology committee for over a decade, co-chairing for two years the pathology working group in the Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP), and serving as a director for the Cure Glomerulonaphropathies (CureGN) DPR.
As a leading pathologist in NEPTUNE, one of the consortia sponsored by the Rare Diseases Clinical Research network (RDCRN), an NIH funded research network with 23 currently active consortia or research groups, she introduced digital pathology for the first time in nephrology research. The NEPTUNE digital pathology DPR served as a model for other consortia that established DPRs in North America, Africa, Asia and Europe to study a variety of kidney diseases, changing permanently the landscape of renal pathology analysis in clinical research.
The establishment of such infrastructures, paired with clinical and molecular datasets and new powerful image analysis tools applied to whole slide images, has allowed for the tissue interrogation and image data extraction in a way that was not possible before, placing pathology central stage in the systems biology and precision medicine era.
Dr Barisoni has been crucial to this transformative process in the field of renal pathology and nephrology.
