First-of-Its-Kind AI-Enabled Service Digitizes Glass Slides to Help Labs Create Digital Pathology Repositories

Despite the potential value and impact of digitizing pathology archives, few pathology labs have achieved large scale digital libraries. Due to the vastly different slide preparation methods over the years as well as the deterioration of slides in storage, the highly labor-intensive process often results in poor quality and inconsistent images. Now, a vertically integrated solution offers a completely automated means for digitization at scale, enabling significant operational efficiencies by limiting human intervention.

Pramana, Inc. (Cambridge, MA, USA) has launched its Digital Pathology as a Service (DPaaS) solution for creating digital pathology repositories. The DPaaS platform offers a first-of-its-kind service to efficiently digitize pathology slides to meet the needs of pathologists, researchers, and clinicians. Pramana uses its intelligent whole slide image acquisition system, fed by a robot and analyzed by proprietary algorithms, to achieve 100% real-time, fully automated quality assessment. A single scanning cluster is capable of scanning over 1,000 slides per day, and Pramana can scale up or down efficiently to achieve customer-desired throughput. Pramana has announced its first commercial agreement with Mayo Clinic, a multi-year collaboration that includes an industry-leading initiative to digitize five million slides – one of the largest digitization efforts in the world to date, at an unprecedented rate.

Image: Digitized pathology slides and associated metadata (Photo courtesy of Pramana, Inc.)

“It is often misconstrued that the challenges with going digital for tissue and body fluid slides end with the purchase of a scanner,” said Prasanth Perugupalli, Chief Product Officer at Pramana. “We realized that the greater pain and costs lie in the human capital needed to operate the scanners, which includes making the correct parametric selections and qualifying each whole slide image for any errors after the scanning is completed. Pramana’s DPaaS solution overcomes these challenges with minimal burden on the labs and delivers quality-assured whole slide images with standardized and open data formats.”

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