Software brings image analysis and big data capabilities to help researchers, clinicians and hospitals collaborate to fight cancer
BALTIMORE, MD (PRWEB) MARCH 25, 2015
Proscia, a medical technology start-up that is dedicated to bringing computer intelligence to pathology, today announced the launch of its first-generation software platform. This initial product release provides multi-gigabyte digital biopsy cloud-based storage and leverages the company’s second-opinion collaboration technology.
Proscia’s cloud-based, modular software platform offers large-scale management, analysis, access, and collaboration for whole slide images in digital pathology. Today’s debut provides an easily managed, highly scalable digital slide repository, with secure data access. Customers include hospitals, academic research institutions, commercial pathology labs, as well as pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
The Proscia platform employs several key technologies to access, analyze and share whole slide images with unprecedented speed, accuracy and quality. “There are tens of millions of biopsies performed annually, analyzed solely by the human eye,” stated David West Jr., Proscia founder and CEO. “This is archaic. We built a modern computing platform that will revolutionize the 150-year-old pathology workflow. Our software can discover and process millions of critical data points that will help pathologists and healthcare providers to diagnose, treat and ultimately prevent cancer.” Proscia’s patent-pending technologies combine multi-tenant cloud computing, image analysis and machine learning with proprietary algorithms to bring unprecedented computer intelligence to the pathology field.
Researchers, pathologists, and other experts, including Dr. George Lee, Ph.D. from The Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics at Case Western Reserve University, have tested Proscia’s technology. Dr. Lee’s research involves collaborating with pathologists to train machine-learning algorithms to study diseases like prostate cancer. “In our lab, we must be able to share whole slide images with expert clinicians who annotate the slides,” said Dr. Lee. “I have worked with a number of interfaces in the past. Proscia’s platform has a sleek, intuitive interface that can handle large images smoothly. I’m excited to see the platform used for research in digital pathology.”
Key features of the Proscia platform that allow users to drastically improve whole slide image workflows include:
- Secure storage, annotation and collaboration on multi-gigabyte digital biopsies
High resolution, deep zoom viewing - Support for all leading whole slide scan formats, as well as static images including Leica Biosystems (Aperio) .svs, .scn, and .tif, Phillips Digital Pathology .tiff, and Roche’s Ventana .bif
- Seamless integration with third-party storage services, including Dropbox, AWS, and in-house storage systems
- Enhanced Dropbox integration that enables multi-terabyte image migration to the Proscia platform in seconds
- Tissue Microarray (TMA) functionality
- No cost sign up and use of the Proscia platform free up to 20GB of storage
Coleman Stavish, Proscia CTO and co-founder, commented, “There was a heavy investment of time to ensure security and scalability in this release. We discovered many hospitals with IT infrastructures that were completely deficient in their ability to handle the memory burden required to store thousands, in many cases millions, of whole slide images. Proscia’s storage capabilities are virtually infinite. It was critical to develop a state-of-the-art software solution with the ability to withstand the tremendous stresses of moving and storing medical information”,
About Proscia
Founded in 2014 by technologists from Johns Hopkins, the Moffitt Cancer Center, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, and the University of Pittsburgh, Proscia is a digital healthcare company with a mission to bring image analysis and big data capabilities to pathology.
Proscia’s main focus area is fighting cancer. The company’s vision is to bring computer intelligence to pathology—to organize the world’s pathology information and put it to use fighting cancer. Image analysis and machine-learning technologies in the company’s technology pipeline will allow for unprecedented big data informatics in the industry.
