On Tues. Oct. 8th, 2024, Assistant Professor of Pathology William Jeck, MD, PhD, was named as Director of Digital Pathology and Enhanced Diagnostics. The new position was created as the department and its laboratories are rapidly expanding the use of digital pathology for clinical care delivery. These efforts align with academic and health system interests to optimize patient care by developing and safely deploying augmented intelligence algorithms to improve diagnostic accuracy, efficiency, and prognostication in ways that respect current pathologist workflows.
Jeck will lead the development of a system-wide strategy for digital pathology across Duke Health and consider all digital assets that exist within the department and its laboratories. This strategy will assist with standardizing practice, will describe how best to integrate information systems, and will streamline the development and deployment of new algorithms in a regulatory-compliant manner.
Jeck will report to Laboratory Informatics Strategy Director Raj Dash, MD, and partner with Duke Health Technology Solutions (DHTS), the Duke AI and Computational Pathology, pathologists, directors, and managers of the various laboratories involved with digital imaging technologies.
Jeck earned his MD/PhD degree at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He pursued his residency in anatomic pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and completed fellowship in gastroenterological surgical pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2019. He has written several research publications in the area of molecular pathology, most notably novel techniques for fusion oncogene detection with Nanopore sequencing.
Since 2019, he has been working as assistant professor of Surgical Pathology at Duke University School of Medicine. Jeck has signed out cases in the diverse areas of gastrointestinal (GI), liver, orthopedic/soft-tissue, autopsy, and molecular pathology. He is director of the Surgical Pathology GI Fellowship and is associate director for the Duke Biorepository and Precision Pathology Center, which has a focus on digital pathology and image analysis. He is co-lead of the Nference project to scan nine million slides of Duke’s pathology archive. His current research focuses on development and practical implementation of AI/Machine learning tools in pathology practice, along with pathology support of other research projects.