Dr. Yukako Yagi’s Digital Pathology Laboratory at the Josie Robertson Surgical Center serves as an incubator to explore, evaluate and develop new technology to advance digital pathology in a clinical setting and actively engage vendors to help improve the technology and develop clinical applicability. Collaborations with clinical departments (e.g., Surgery), Radiology, Medical Physics, and Informatics groups, enhance these assessments and creates opportunities for multidisciplinary applications.
Dr. Yagi completed her Doctorate in Medical Science at Tokyo Medical University in Japan. She has a broad interest in various aspects of medical science, which include the development and validation of technologies in digital imaging, such as color and image quality calibration, evaluation and optimization, digital staining, 3D imaging, and decision support systems for pathology diagnosis, research and education.
Since joining MSK, she has led pioneering work using MicroCT, Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) and Confocal imaging to connect multi-dimensional and multi-modality images (e.g., single-cell to whole-body analysis). She participated in creating image viewers for several imaging modalities and established new imaging data formats. Her team has established the technology to streamline colorization within Pathology 3D, i.e., H&E, immuno-florescent, immuno-histochemistry, and florescence in situ hybridization imaging. Once the colorization is mapped, it can be correlated with another modality such as radiology, for a holistic analysis that will improve patient care and outcomes. The team also created 3D histology images of a single organ using thousands of slides.
Dr. Yagi’s work further enriches our knowledge of disease by integrating computational pathology data with other specimen-related data (genomics, proteomics, radiographic imaging, etc.). This brings an unprecedented breadth and depth of information to each individual case and yields a comprehensive, multidimensional analysis that would otherwise be impossible.