Industry’s most flexible digital pathology platform can now tightly integrate elements of even the most intricate anatomic pathology laboratory operations
BALTIMORE (PRWEB) MARCH 27, 2018
Proscia Inc., creators of AI-powered digital pathology software, today announced the release of its first major expansion to its digital pathology workflow management platform optimized for anatomic pathology labs. First introduced in September 2017, Proscia’s platform can now support an integrated and flexible workflow that accommodates the entire range of pathology services that a lab might provide to make labs more efficient and potentially increase revenue.
Designed for labs with anatomic pathology workflows and optimized for pathologists, histotechnologists, and lab managers, Proscia’s expanded platform can now be configured with multiple workflows across multiple clinical use cases.
“Preparing histology slides for digital sharing used to require multiple manual steps including labeling and annotating the image file and selecting files for upload,” said Dr. Ashley Hill, lead consulting pathologist at ResourcePath, a Sterling, Virginia mouse and human disease research laboratory. “With Proscia’s automatic scanner-sync and barcode support, we can load our 400 slides on the Aperio scanner, click the scan button and walk away. The platform reads the information that we embed in the barcoded slide label from our LIMS to annotate the file. And Proscia’s web interface lets me pull up my cases from anywhere, making it a snap to share with our customers and collaborators from around the world.”
Built from its award-winning software platform, Proscia’s digital pathology workflow management solution leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, leading the move towards precision medicine and computational pathology. Proscia provides hospital, academic, and commercial labs a digital platform for generating additional revenue and improving workflow efficiency, while driving accuracy and increased confidence in results that benefits both pathologists and patients.
“A pathology lab sees several different processes take place for each type of case,” said Coleman Stavish, CTO at Proscia. “An effective digital pathology system needs to work for multiple scenarios and use-cases—it isn’t ‘one-size-fits-all.’ The computational pathology future so many of us envision hinges on robust, flexible, and easy-to-use digital workflow infrastructure. By reducing the friction of adopting digital pathology, this release marks an important milestone in our journey to bring value-add applications to anatomic pathology.”
This new clinical offering expansion enables the following:
Smart workflows: Automated quantification can determine case workflow. For example, the platform can be used for molecular preprocessing workflows or produce an automated H&E analysis that flags low-quality samples with minimal user input. Cases are sortable/searchable by workflow type, priority, assigned user, or any additional user- or LIMS-defined metadata needed.
Improved barcode support to eliminate re-accession cases: Proscia’s platform automatically performs the “digital accession” based on the slide barcode information, optionally in conjunction with LIMS interfacing. This greatly reduces the burden on the histotechnologist, enabling the wider laboratory to benefit from digital pathology while enabling the histotechnologist to focus on the most important aspects of the job: High-quality tissue processing and preparation. Additionally, the reduced likelihood of sample mis-labeling can enable laboratories to seek reduced malpractice insurance premiums.
Role- and group-based rules for case access, making it easier to divide project assignments between histotechnologists, pathologists, managers, directors, and others.
Custom interfaces for each user, with individual case permissions. For example, cases from one satellite lab may be programmed to not be visible to another satellite location, but users at a hub location may have access to cases from all satellite labs. Single sign-on (SSO) via integration with customer identity providers provides enhanced security and ease of use
Seamless installations. Proscia’s platform can be deployed behind institutional firewalls or alternatively leverage secure, HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure.
Proscia’s cloud-based platform offers an opportunity to combine the Whole Slide Images of digital pathology with other sources of data – such as LIMS, EMR, laboratory data (“-omics”), and radiology images, and then apply AI-based algorithms to provide pathologists with a more complete, computer-assisted view of the disease processes present in a tissue sample. Such algorithms can identify complex histological patterns like tumors, classify cancer subtypes, and even predict outcomes with a high degree of accuracy. These building block capabilities can be deployed in pathology workflows for precision screening, automated triaging, and used as image-based assays as corollaries or in complement with their molecular counterparts.
Proscia recently announced it will launch the industry’s first comprehensive dermatopathology-specific computational pathology suite in Q4 2018, implemented as a new AI module to the Proscia platform currently in use at over 300 organizations worldwide.
The company also recently updated its research and academic platform with a Tissue Microarray (TMA) management. The software automatically identifies the constituent cores and enables custom metadata to be associated with each slide, making these slides easier to access. This process reduces time and frustration for users, speeds TMA assessment, potentially provides additional insight for researchers, and enables core laboratories to deliver TMA slides digitally along with easy-to-use management software to their customers as opposed to a folder of images on a hard drive.
If your lab is interested in becoming a digital pathology partner, visit https://proscia.com/partner.
For those interested in further information on why institutions are going digital and how they approach best practices in digital implementation, join Proscia’s upcoming webinar in partnership with The Pathologist and Leica Biosystems: “Going Digital: The Whys and Hows of Adopting Digital Pathology at Your Lab.” This webinar and live Q&A will show how easy implementation can be by viewing example applications and important considerations for transitioning to a digital workflow and discussing the recent and future changes that digital pathology will bring to the laboratory space. Click here to sign up for the event, which will be held Tuesday, April 24 at 4:00 p.m. ET; and Wednesday, April 25 at 4:00 p.m. GMT.
*Proscia software is not intended for use in primary diagnosis.
About Proscia
Proscia was founded in 2014 by a team out of Johns Hopkins, the Moffitt Cancer Center, and the University of Pittsburgh to improve clinical outcomes and accelerate the discovery of breakthrough advancements in the fight against cancer. Using modern computing technologies that unlock hidden data not visible to the human eye and turning that data into valuable insights in the fight against cancer, the company is dedicated to improving the efficiency, speed and quality of pathology diagnostics and research.
