Agreement to Develop, Market Integrated Digital Pathology Solutions

Royal Philips Electronics (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) and NEC Corporation (Tokyo, Japan) have signed an agreement under which the two companies will jointly develop and market highly integrated digital pathology solutions.

Initially targeted to assist in the grading of breast cancer and prostate cancer, the solutions will be based around Philips' new high-throughput pathology slide scanner and NEC's e-Pathologist Cancer Diagnosis Assistance System. They 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.

When a lesion is suspected to be cancerous or precancerous, the normal procedure is to remove a sample of tissue from it and send it to a pathology lab for examination. A thin section of the tissue is mounted on a glass slide, stained to highlight various structures, and visually examined under a microscope.

Philips' ultra-fast slide scanner, which is already commercially available in Europe for research purposes only, employs a unique "continuous autofocus" technology that accurately follows height variations in the tissue surface over horizontal distances as short as 30 µm, allowing extremely high definition full-slide images to be captured in less than one minute per slide.

NEC's e-Pathologist system will detect tissue and cell features within these images in order to identify regions of interest and make quantitative measurements of key structures in conventionally stained (hematoxylin and eosin) tissue samples, or samples stained with immunohistochemistry reagents. These quantitative measurements should assist pathologists in making decisions relating to the clinical treatment of cancer in individual patients.

Philips and NEC aim to produce initial development results from their joint development in digital pathology within the current year.

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Royal Philips Electronics
NEC Corporation