Digital Pathology Blog

Futurescape Report: CAP Leaders Say Embrace Innovation’s Challenges, Opportunities

Courtesy of CAP STATLINE
The breakneck emergence of innovative technologies and the shift away from traditional reimbursement models is creating new challenges—and opportunities—for pathologists, said CAP leaders at the recent Futurescape Conference.
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2011 ASCP Annual Meeting/WASPaLM XXVI World Congress - Abstract Deadline Near

• Submissions cannot have been presented, published, or submitted for presentation or publication elsewhere.
• All abstracts must be submitted electronically by April 29, 2011. Late abstracts, or those received by any means other than the ASCP abstract submission website will not be reviewed by ASCP.
• Abstracts must be submitted in English. Submitting an abstract does NOT guarantee its acceptance at the 2011 ASCP Annual Meeting/WASPaLM XXVI World Congress. ASCP will provide notification of final status to all abstract submissions by July 1, 2011.
• Particular attention should be given to products or equipment that bear registered trade names. Provide the company name and its city and state address parenthetically following the first mention of the product.
• References should not be used. No charts, figures, or tables should be used.
• Notice of acceptance will be sent via e-mail only. When setting up your user account, please use all fields for author and administrative support so that you will receive notices in a timely manner.
• An initial confirmation e-mail will inform you of the receipt of your submission.
• Authors will be notified in late summer of their status as a finalist in a poster competition, selection for an oral platform presentation, or poster session day and time assignment.
• All submitted abstracts will be peer reviewed. Refer to the “Abstract Submission Guidelines” for grading criteria and other details of the abstract submission process.
• For further information please e-mail us at abstracts@ascp.org or call 312-541-4943.

You may download a PDF copy of the abstract submission guidelines by clicking here.

Exhibitors Sought for the Pathology Informatics 2011 Conference in Pittsburgh

We are seeking exhibitors for the Pathology Informatics 2011 conference that will take place at the Wyndham Hotel in Pittsburgh on October 4-7, 2011. This conference resulted from a merger of two previous pathology informatics conferences, Lab Infotech Summit and APIII. The inaugural merged conference was held in Boston last September. A total of 41 exhibitors participated in that event with about 250 paid registrants in attendance.

via labsoftnews.typepad.com

Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Uses Aperio’s Digital Pathology System to Provide Anatomic Pathology Consulting Services to China

30 UCLA Sub-Specialty Pathologists Available to Second Affiliated Hospital Zhejiang University

Vista, CA – April 26, 2011 - Aperio, the global leader in providing digital pathology solutions that improve patient care, today announced that its digital pathology system is being used to support subspecialty pathology consultations between Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (UCLA) in Los Angeles, Calif., and Second Affiliated Hospital Zhejiang University, (ZHU) a 2,000-bed top-ranked hospital located in Hangzhou, China. 

UCLA has a pool of more than 30 sub-specialty experts in pathology that are available to provide remote medical consultation services to China for unusual and complex cases. Aperio’s patented scanning technology allows pathologists at ZHU to capture a digital slide image at very high resolution of the entire tissue sample on a glass slide and share it with pathology experts at UCLA in a secure web-based environment. More than 100 cases have been remotely reviewed to date. The Aperio digital pathology system facilitates the ability to bring high-quality, expert pathology services to China, significantly improving intra and inter observer agreement and ensuring effective treatment to improve patient care. 

“UCLA and ZHU selected the only true global leader in digital pathology that can deliver a complete remote consultation capability today,” said Dirk G. Soenksen, CEO of Aperio. “Aperio is helping healthcare organizations of all types deliver sub-specialty pathology services via online access to topnotch virtual pathologists. Pathology expertise is just a mouse click away anywhere in the world to help ensure the best pathology services possible in a fast and cost-effective way.” 

Use of Aperio’s patented ScanScope® scanners, Spectrum™ image management (PACS) software and remote viewing technology allows U.S. healthcare companies to compete at an international level, facilitating real-time, high performance access to high-resolution digital slide images. 

Jonathan Braun, M.D., Ph.D., chair of pathology and laboratory medicine, and professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, stated, “Digital pathology allows UCLA to offer the advanced skills of our sub-specialty pathologists to China in real time when a specific type of pathology expertise is needed quickly on a difficult or complex case. Our collaboration illustrates how integral pathology is to patient outcomes. Pathologists have become influential partners in treatment. Digital pathology dramatically enhances our ability to provide patient-centered care.” 

UCLA and ZHU pathologists also participate in frequent digital slide conferences using the Aperio system to review individual cases. Pathologists can view annotations on the digital slide image created by other reviewers, while simultaneously adding annotations for others to see. A common cursor superimposed on the digital slide is visible and can be manipulated by all conference participants. The hospitals are also conducting multi-disciplinary conferences, where experts across various disciplines (oncology, radiology, surgery) convene to discuss difficult cases. 

With more system installations than all other digital pathology vendors combined, Aperio is the true global leader and reliable choice for world class digital pathology solutions. The company boasts a global installed base of more than 800 systems in over 30 countries, including more than 500 systems in hospitals and reference laboratories, the 13 largest pharmaceutical companies and a multitude of biotechnology and government organizations.  

 

Regional Healthcare Event Series by Aperio -- Atlanta, Philadelphia & Baltimore this May

Join us for the 2011 “Discover Your Path to Improved Patient Care” Regional Healthcare Event Series featuring Jared N. Schwartz, M.D., Ph.D.,  Aperio technical experts, and leading innovators who will discuss how they are using digital pathology. May 17 ~ Atlanta, GA Seminar Event   May 18 ~ Philadelphia, PA User Group*   May 19 ~ Baltimore, MD Seminar Event All events are complimentary and include validated parking, breakfast, and lunch. Topics vary by location and include: • Digital Pathology Beyond the Scan: Improving Patient Care and Enabling Personalized Medicine  • Tips and Tricks for Spectrum Plus and ScanScopes • Phased Adoption: Helping Hospitals Implement Digital Pathology • Global Research Collaboration in a Shrinking World - Unlocking the Possibilities • Virtual Microscopy Meets Next Generation Sequencing: Strange Bedfellows in the Genomic Age • From Teaching to Research - Practical Use of Aperio in an Academic Institution • Selected Topics in Image Analysis for IHC • Special Local Area Speaker Sessions • Roundtable Discussions RSVP TODAY TO RESERVE YOUR SEAT! To RSVP for any of these events, contact Nicole Siska, Aperio Events Team, at 760.539.1193 or nsiska@aperio.com *The May 18 Philadelphia event is intended for Aperio users who have a working knowledge of the Aperio system.

Dr. David Eberhard joins Flagship Biosciences as Chief Medical Pathologist

Pharmaceutical veteran anatomic pathologist strengthens Flagship's expertise in oncology and clinical trials

Flagstaff, AZ (04/26/2011) —Flagship Biosciences announced today that Dr. David Eberhard MD, PhD has been appointed Chief Medical Pathologist. Dr. Eberhard is an anatomic/molecular pathologist highly regarded for his leadership and expertise in oncology clinical trials and pharmaceutical drug development. He holds an academic appointment as Associate Professor, Department of Pathology and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, he served as the Director of Clinical Trials Pathology Services at LabCorp’s Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology, after a distinguished career at Genentech and as an industry consultant. He earned his MD in Pathology and his Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Michigan Medical School, followed by residency training in anatomic pathology and neuropathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Dr. Eberhard has been active in developing standardized approaches for molecular pathologic analyses of solid tumors in clinical trials, such as the publication of industry working group recommendations for EGFR testing in pathology. “The addition of Dr. Eberhard to Flagship’s pathology and development team further strengthens our position as a leader in qualitative and quantitative digital pathology.” said Dr. David Young, President of Flagship Biosciences.“He has been a steady encouragement from the beginnings of Flagship and has a great vision for applications of image analysis in both research and clinical medicine”. 

David Eberhard has served on the Scientific Advisory Board for Flagship Biosciences, and in his new expanded role will strengthen the collaboration provided by Flagship’s network of anatomic pathologists of various specializations in the United States and Europe, and facilitate closer interactions and innovation between Flagship’s new quantitative pathology approaches, academic investigation and oncology drug development. 

“Flagship has a unique focus on cutting-edge digital pathology approaches to maximize efficiency of anatomic pathology analyses, to allow precise, accurate and reproducible quantitation of pathology readouts, and to support the clinical development of drugs and companion diagnostics” said Dr. Eberhard. "Flagship's perspective and expertise represent a valuable resource for basic, translational and clinical R&D that has huge potential to create real progress in science and industry."

Flagship Biosciences is a pathologist-owned pharmaceutical services organization that specializes in the delivery of quantitative pathology to pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device clients. Flagship leverages digital pathology to combine novel quantitative scoring algorithms with anatomic pathology expertise and experience. They are the largest provider of pathologist-supervised brightfield and fluorescence scanning and custom image analysis capabilities.

 

Philips and NEC Team Up in Digital Pathology

This sounds interesting -- combination of high-end imaging system from Philips with added quantitation tools provided by NEC.  According to the press release, look for results of this partnership by years' end.
 
Eindhoven, the Netherlands and Tokyo, Japan – Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today 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.
 
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.”
 
Philips’ ultra-fast slide scanner, which is already commercially available only in Europe for research purposes, employs a unique ‘continuous auto-focus’ technology that accurately follows height variations in the tissue surface over horizontal distances as short as 30 microns, allowing extremely high definition full-slide images to be captured in under one minute per slide.

NEC’s e-Pathologist system will use ‘machine intelligence’ to 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 & Eosin) tissue samples, or samples stained with immunohistochemistry reagents. These quantitative measurements could assist pathologists in making decisions relating to the clinical treatment of cancer in individual patients. NEC has jointly evaluated this system with SRL, Inc., the largest laboratory test center in Japan, for biopsy of stomach cancer and has also started marketing a system focused on stomach and breast cancer. In addition, NEC has jointly evaluated its e-Pathologist system with the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in the USA.

“As a leader in medical innovation, Massachusetts General Hospital Pathology has long been committed to utilizing imaging and data analysis for diagnosis and discovery. Digital pathology and diagnostic imaging analysis are obviously important areas of development driving such innovation,” said Dr. David Louis, Chief of Pathology at MGH. “

We are pleased to have been involved in the development of the Philips high throughput scanner and the NEC e-Pathologist system and look forward to the next phase of their development."

The digital pathology solution of Philips features an open architecture that allows partners/vendors to expand the system’s capability by integrating their own added-value hardware and/or software algorithms into it. This will allow the creation of total system solutions designed to empower pathologists by delivering increased workflow efficiency, improved diagnostic performance and better patient outcomes. Partnering with Philips, a world leading company in healthcare markets, will therefore help NEC to develop its technology to suit worldwide market requirements.
 

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

Ben Smith game 6 OT goal. Canucks at Blackhawks. Pat Foley call.

In case you missed it -- Pat Foley call for Game 6 Blackhawks vs. Canucks.  No better announcer in hockey. 

Best thing I have heard all year -- "Game 7 will be played on Tuesday night."

Proposed Accountable Care Organization Regulations

On April 7, 2011, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ("CMS") issued its proposed regulations covering Accountable Care Organizations ("ACOs"). When adopted in final form, this rule will implement Section 3022 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which requires CMS to establish a Shared Savings Program by January 1, 2012. These proposed regulations are the first in a series, and set forth the basic eligibility requirements for ACOs to participate in the Shared Savings Program; quality of care and other reporting measures; the methodology for assigning Medicare beneficiaries to ACOs; the payment methodologies under the Shared Savings Program; monitoring of ACOs for compliance with applicable criteria; and the sanctions for non-compliance. Comments regarding the proposed regulations are due by June 6, 2011. This alert is intended to provide only a high level summary of the proposed regulations.

The proposed regulations define an ACO as a legal entity recognized to conduct business under state law, with a governance structure that will enable it to receive and distribute shared savings, establish and report compliance with the ACO quality and reporting requirements, and perform other tasks set forth in the regulations. An ACO may be established by: (a) professionals in group practices, (b) networks of individual practices, (c) ventures between hospitals and professionals, (d) hospitals who employ professionals, and (d) critical access hospitals. Other health care providers and suppliers may participate in an ACO, but they cannot establish an ACO. It is important to note that primary care professionals (which include professionals in the specialties of general practice, family practice, internal medicine or geriatric medicine) can only be ACO participants in a single ACO, whereas other types of providers, such as specialist physicians, may participate in multiple ACOs.    

Click here for full text of the alert.

Courtesy of McDonald Hopkins

Aperio Awarded Patent for Innovation that Improves Digital Pathology Workflow

Aperio continues to add to its IP portfolio with streamlined workflow patented technology.

Creation of complete digital slide image file - during scanning - results in fastest scanners, streamlines workflow and simplifies IT

VISTA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aperio, the global leader in providing digital pathology solutions that improve patient care, announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company patent No. 7,826,649 entitled, “Data Management in a Linear-array-based Microscope Slide Scanner.”

The ‘649 patent describes techniques invented by Aperio for efficiently processing large image files — during the scanning process — to create a single high-quality digital slide image. The ability to create a single digital slide, including image compression, during the scanning process results in faster overall scanning and streamlines digital pathology workflow.

“This patent highlights our ability to create a single digital slide image during the scanning process, which is why our scanners continue to be the fastest on the market,” commented Dirk G. Soenksen, CEO of Aperio. “Our sub-95 second scan time includes all steps required to create a single digital slide image file by the scanning instrument. This patent requires others to divide the scanning process between the scanning instrument and a dedicated server, and to post-compress the imagery data on the server. Doing so takes much longer than their advertised scanning time, complicates the workflow, and requires moving and storing gigabytes of imagery data.”

Aperio has the highest throughput scanners available today. The company’s family of ScanScope® scanners are based on line-scanning, which has become the standard for scanning performance and image quality in the digital pathology industry. Line scanning rapidly produces seamless digital slide images with unsurpassed image quality, and is critical to a pathologist’s ability to make informed diagnoses and prognoses of diseases.

The patent strengthens Aperio’s comprehensive intellectual property portfolio comprising more than 80 issued and pending patents world-wide, and provides the company with ownership of key innovations that address critical pathology imaging needs.

With more system installations than all other digital pathology vendors combined, Aperio is the true global leader and reliable choice for world class digital pathology solutions. The company boasts a global installed base of more than 800 systems in over 30 countries, including more than 500 systems in hospitals and reference laboratories, the 13 largest pharmaceutical companies and a multitude of biotechnology and government organizations.

About Aperio

Aperio is the leading provider of digital pathology solutions in hospitals, reference labs, and pharmaceutical and research institutions across the world. Today, our affordable and complete product portfolio improves patient care by enhancing quality assurance, delivering more efficient workflows, facilitating access to new and more targeted therapies, and improving pathologists’ skills via lifelong education. Our comprehensive product line features our ScanScope® scanners, Spectrum™ image management (PACS) software, SecondSlide® slide sharing service for pathology, and image analysis tools and services. Aperio’s products are FDA cleared for specific clinical applications, and are intended for research and education use for other applications. For clearance updates and more information please visit www.aperio.com.