Those magnificent pathologists and their computational machines

Computers are discrete state machines operated by a series of instructions contained in an algorithm. Humanity has long been concerned that such machines might come to emulate human thinking. The advent of high-performance computers, the availability of large amount of digital data and machine learning algorithms allowed computational machines to perform tasks once considered to require human understanding. Such models now form part of the arsenal that pathologists have at their disposal. In this article, we discuss how this technology has been incorporated into practice, from the human perspective of making a diagnosis. More than assisting with many processes involved in diagnostic activity, this technology has potential for rescuing the scientific interest in the structural analysis of cells and tissues, as we human pathologists have been doing for the last 200 years.