Philips, NEC team up in digital pathology

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Royal Philips Electronics and NEC Corp have signed an agreement under which the two companies will jointly develop and market highly integrated digital pathology solutions.

Based around Philips’ new high-throughput pathology slide scanner and NEC’s e-Pathologist Cancer Diagnosis Assistance System, these innovative digital pathology solutions will be designed to use advanced digital techniques to add quantitative analysis to the qualitative information derived from the visual inspection of pathology slides, which is currently the standard procedure. They will initially be targeted to assist in the grading of breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Whenever a lesion is suspected to be cancerous or pre-cancerous, the normal procedure is to remove a sample of tissue from it (a biopsy) and send it to a pathology lab for examination by a pathologist. To conduct this examination, a thin section of the tissue is mounted on a glass slide, stained with chemicals to highlight various structures and visually examined under a microscope. With the increasing incidence of cancer and the growing need for methods of sub-typing the disease in order to deliver optimized therapy, there is a real need for digital pathology systems that speed up the workflow, while also providing pathologists with additional checks to improve diagnostic quality and specificity.

“Reliable computer-aided identification of regions of interest, based on the morphology of potentially cancerous cells in stained tissue samples, clearly depends on having high quality images to work with,” says Tadashi Higashino, Senior Vice President at NEC. “We firmly believe that the continuous auto-focus technology developed by Philips for use in its slide scanners will provide exceptional image detail and quality, allowing our advanced image analysis and machine learning algorithms to achieve optimum results.”

“With its e-Pathology system, NEC already has an impressive position in the digital pathology market in Japan and is well positioned to duplicate that success in many other parts of the world,” says Perry van Rijsingen, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Philips Healthcare Incubator. “I believe our joint development of highly integrated systems that combine superior slide scanning with state-of-the-art image analysis will be essential to unlocking the growth potential of digital pathology by helping to meet the ever-increasing demand for high-volume high-throughput pathology solutions.”