From Pixels to Precision 002: Making Sense of the Digital Pathology Ecosystem- Part 2

Market Landscape

“When we were evaluating the digital pathology ecosystem, one of the first things we realized is that the ecosystem is complex. There are so many different digital pathology companies. And it’s so hard to tell at face value what part of the ecosystem each company is working on.” said James Sweeney, President of PathAI Diagnostics, formerly known as Poplar Healthcare.

As pointed out in a recent digital pathology market report from Decibio, digital pathology is undoubtedly complex and crowded. Each of these players are either married to a single vertical in the digital pathology workflow or do work across a limited set of verticals. There’s scanner companies who have image management systems, standalone image management system companies, image management companies with artificial intelligence solutions, and artificial intelligence companies with simple viewers to access the outputs of their algorithms.

The digital pathology market is beastly! And the number of partnerships in the market are only continuing to increase. It’s not a surprise that many pathologists and laboratories are looking for a single vendor with vast partnerships across the ecosystem and a broad menu of digital solutions across these components. We’ve broken down the market below based on the framework that we introduced last week in Part 1 of the blog series.

PathAI: A Central Hub for Digital Pathology

So where does PathAI fit into all of this? We believe we are uniquely positioned to be that single central hub through the products we develop in-house and the strong partnerships we have across the ecosystem. We also encourage our partners to build their own algorithms to integrate into our workflow!

• LIS/LIMS: PathAI has strong partnerships with laboratory information system companies that offer solutions not only for large academic medical centers but also independent anatomic pathology laboratories. In fact, next week, PathAI will be having a joint webinar with Novopath, a leading AP LIS, to discuss how we can be that one-stop shop for digital for independent labs.
• Scanners: PathAI has strong partnerships with multiple vendors such as Philips and Roche. These partnerships enable PathAI to build an image management system and an algorithm menu that is interoperable to various different file formats, scanners, and images as well as facilitate migration of their files and file formats to our platforms.
• Image Management System: PathAI recently launched an image management system called AISight. Unlike other image management systems on the market, AISight is designed for the next-generation of anatomic pathology laboratories. It is not only intuitive to use for pathologists to onboard quickly onto a new platform but also designed with a forward view on deployment of algorithms that are either developed by PathAI, partner institutions, or third-party vendors.
• AI Applications: PathAI has always been a leader in algorithm development. With more than a hundred algorithms across oncology and non-oncology indications and multiple stains, PathAI has the broadest algorithm menu on the market. Moreover, we’ve built out a machine learning pipeline that is unparalleled in its ability to source diverse data, annotate that data with real sub-specialist pathologist input, and then leverage those annotations as inputs into algorithm development to build robust and generalizable models that meet the highest quality standards and are robustly backed with strong peer-reviewed evidence.
• Data Storage: PathAI has strong partnerships with all of the major cloud vendors, particularly Amazon Web Services. All of our solutions are cloud-based. As such, we are experts in how to optimize data storage in the cloud for performance and cost. Our relationships with these vendors also means that the performance and cost savings can be passed onto laboratories.

Conclusion

All in all. The digital pathology ecosystem is crowded, complicated, and intricate. There are a lot of vendors to select from. A laboratory serious about digitization must often comb through these intricacies. But is it worth the time to do so? In the coming weeks - we will dive deeper into the benefits of digital pathology and artificial intelligence to discuss whether it’s worth it!