Royal Philips Electronics and NEC Corporation announced the signing of 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.
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.