Every slide tells a story.

Pathologist Ashley Kiemen holds one up, peering at a sliver of tissue that offers a snapshot of a Johns Hopkins patient with a certain type of pancreatic cancer.

The slide captures a single moment in time. What it doesn’t do, however, is pinpoint the very first signs of disease, analyze how the patient responded to treatment, or add to a data set that could revolutionize understanding and treatment of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors.

For all that to happen, Kiemen and her team are digitizing that slide and thousands more as part of a sweeping movement that is transforming medical research, care and education at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.

About two years ago, Johns Hopkins Health System clinicians began digitizing patient slides as a matter of routine and storing the information in patients’ electronic medical records, explains Ralph Hruban, director of the Department of Pathology.

That amounts to about 10,000 slides each month from patients treated at Johns Hopkins, as well as those who bring biopsy materials in for a second opinion, he says. Yet it’s just a fraction of the millions of Johns Hopkins slides available for digitization, most stored in an offsite facility and representing decades of patient care and second opinions.

“The potential is enormous,” says Hruban.

Researchers such as Kiemen are chipping away at the collection as they digitize specific data sets for their research.

Kiemen, her students and pathology fellows are scanning about 25,000 slides from The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center patients since the 1990s to create a digital blueprint of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor cells. There could be five to 25 slides per patient, created over the course of treatment, Kiemen says.

Then they use CODA, a deep learning tissue mapping platform they developed, to create three-dimensional models of healthy and cancer-containing pancreas specimens, showing the tissues at subcellular resolution.

“This will give us a sense of what the tissue looked like in thousands of different patients with the same disease,” says Kiemen. With that information, clinicians can better diagnose cancers in their earliest stages, and researchers will gain understanding of how these cancerous cells behave. Also, educators will have new tools to aid student learning. (The Johns Hopkins digital pathology public repository is one of several that allows researchers to share their images.)

“Pathology has a long history of embracing automation and technology,” says Alexander Baras, director of pathology informatics, who is leading the digitization effort. “It’s going to make us more efficient, it’s going to make us more accurate and it will eventually uncover new features of a disease.”