The topic of virtual storage is a heating up in digital pathology and in healthcare as a whole. With massive amounts of health data being created from millions of patients (not to mention the gigabyte scale WSIs), in-house hospital infrastructure is bursting at the pipes and health IT is moving to cloud systems. In our early days (way back in 2014 – an decade in startup years), we worked with research labs that were storing static TMA cores and whole slide images on Dropbox and needed a way to facilitate remote collaboration. We designed our migration-storage-access-collaboration workflow to integrate with Dropbox to eliminate the tedious upload process for labs already storing images on the service. In other words, we can move gigabytes of data within the cloud in just a second or two and let the doctors skip right to the good stuff. This has proved to be an excellent model, and when we launched in March we heard from users who wanted the same capabilities with Box. Box is an incredible cloud storage service that lends itself quite well to clinical IT, with its special focus on large-scale, enterprise-grade file management. Major groups like MD Anderson, GlaxoSmithKline, and our friends here at Johns Hopkins Medicine are using Box for its HIPAA-compliant structure and robust security standards.
Box aligned well with what we were doing at Proscia, so we decided to integrate it into our platform. Accessing and collaborating on whole slide images for Box users in clinical and research settings is crazy easy now, and maintains an incredibly high standard for security that is critical in this space. When you click the Box button in the upload window and select the images you want, the content moves instantly into your repository and is accessible in full resolution immediately after deep-zoom conversion.
