Digital Transformation in Pathology

In the second of this special two podcast celebrating our twentieth anniversary, hear from Visiopharm founder and CEO Michael Grunkin.With the regulatory approvals of whole slide imaging systems, digital pathology became the modality for routine diagnostics. Digitalization of pathology is aiming at increasing precision and productivity in the pathology lab, but the adoption of this field is slower than expected. One of the causes of the slow adoption is that going digital in a pathology lab means a much bigger investment than just the cost of the whole slide scanners for slide digitization. Additional costs include digital storage and infrastructure, slide and workflow management and connectivity to lab information systems. Because the improvements in precision and productivity gained by going digital are modest at best, a higher value is expected from image analysis and artificial intelligence. The research and diagnostic applications of image analysis have been explored for decades already and many have found great use in the research-diagnostics continuum. However, a large need for standardization of tissue diagnostic assays remains unmet. Standardization of the staining and of the diagnostic interpretation of tests would tremendously benefit pathology and patient care. So far, the standardization efforts focused on the interpretation part of the puzzle. Several quantification algorithms have been developed, many of which received regulatory clearance. At the same time the IHC assays on which the algorithms are based often lack standardization, and this is where more effort should be put. Currently only pathology institutions that go fully digital reap the digital pathology benefits. There is not an efficient way to start slowly, rather it seems to be “all or nothing”. Enabling institutions to embark on the digital pathology journey in an incremental fashion would change the digital pathology landscape and significantly increase the adoption of this technology. The more value on different fronts digital pathology can provide to institutions and patients, the more the adoption will increase. And we have not yet explored all the ways in which value can be provided.

In part one of our special two part podcast celebrating our twentieth anniversary, hear from Visiopharm founder and CEO Michael Grunkin.Visiopharm is a company offering image analysis software used on pathology images. The software has been on the market for over 20 years and has evolved through the transition of digital microscopy to digital pathology. Digital microscopy provided static tissue images captured through the microscope camera and only branched out into digital pathology with the wider availability and adoption of whole slide scanners. Image analysis spans digital microscopy and digital pathology, and image analysis methods had to evolve in parallel with the imaging technologies to address the hypercomplex pathology problems.The complexity of digital pathology problems and research questions increases with every additional stain and scientific discovery. Visiopharm’s team challenged themselves with providing an image analysis solution capable of addressing this hypercomplexity and enabling researchers to advance scientifically with their tool.Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities applied to computer vision problems took tissue image analysis to a whole new level and incorporating AI into the Visiopharm software tremendously increased the accessibility of this method.In addition to the two well-known technologies that enabled digital pathology breakthroughs (whole slide imaging and AI) two other important advancements happened during the last two decades:emphasis on interoperability between different digital pathology systemsadvances in the field of data visualisationTogether these four components are driving the progress of digital pathology both on the diagnostic and research front.During the last 20 years Visiopharm grew significantly, both organically and through funding and they continue creating value and powerful image analysis tools for the tissue image analysis community.Listen to the full episode with Visiopharm’s CEO Michael Grunkin to learn more about this 20-year perspective on what happened in the field of digital microscopy and digital pathology.

Episode notesLength: 35 minutes.Learn more about AI-powered phenotyping of multiplexed imagesLet us know what you think of the episode and any topics you would like us to cover in the future by sending us an email at: [email protected] podcasts you might find interesting:What to consider when choosing an image analysis solution for phenotypingHow to make sense of multiplex data with phenotypingIntroduction to multiplex for tissue image analysis

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