Can I download images from Imagebase and use in my lecture presentations?
Yes, this is usually possible, but permission is required and the source must be mentioned in the presentation slide. For permission email lars.egevad(at)ki.se.
How does Imagebase relate to The International Society of Urological Pathology?
Imagebase was launched when Lars Egevad served as President of the Society 2015-2017. The uploading of cases started in May 2015 and was more or less finished in 2017. All panel members were members of ISUP at that time. Imagebase was linked to the ISUP website but in 2025 the ISUP council decided to shut down its website and have it replaced by a new one. Imagebase was then moved out to the current web address.
How was consensus defined?
There were 24 members in each organ panel and 16 votes were required for consensus. Once this threshold was reached, case were automatically moved to Public cases. If all 24 voted this corresponded to 2/3 agreement. If fewer voted, the agreement level of public cases will be higher. Several panel members have passed away since Imagebase was launched in 2016. It would be difficult to replace them with others since that would compromise reproducibility studies based on the Imagebase data. For this reason the database has now been locked so no more cases can be uploaded and no more votes cast.
How were panel members selected?
We wanted to make sure to include international leaders specialized on each organ (prostate, bladder, kidney), but we also tried to obtain a global representation since diagnostic practices may vary slightly between countries. All invited experts except one accepted the invitation.
Is it possible to get to know why the experts opted for a certain diagnosis?
Yes, in some cases the experts have added comments. Click on ‘Show diagnosis by expert panel members’ and a Table will appear. The pathologists are anonymized in this Table. There is also a column for ‘Difficulty’ where the individual experts have stated if they consider the case typical for the diagnostic category or bordering to another category.
What do the buttons View and Evaluate mean?
The option View will display the cases in consecutive order with the consensus grade and the voting results of the experts.
With the option Evaluate the cases will be displayed without the expert diagnosis, meaning that you can test your diagnostic ability by choosing from the alternatives in the roll down menu.
What was the rationale of Imagebase?
The aim was to set up a reference image database for standardization of urological pathology, in particular grading and tumor classification. Lack of interobserver reproducibility has been a well-recognized problem in pathology, even among leading experts. By setting up a large image library that has been approved by international experts we offer pathologists the opportunity to calibrate themselves against leaders in the field. An important element of Imagebase is that the voting has been done independently, i.e. without knowing the votes of the other experts. This ensures that the voting results are unbiased and reflect the actual practice of the experts.
Who constructed the technical mechanism of the database?
This was done by the web designer Jonas Hörnblad, Stockholm in collaboration with Lars Egevad.
Why are the cases presented with a series of jpg images rather than whole slide images (WSIs)?
It was important for us to make Imagebase readily available also in low resource countries where internet connections may be slower. For most pathologists reviewing jps photos will also be much faster than moving around in WSIs. Another reason for not including WSIs was the costs for strorage of large files.