July 12, 2024 — Diagnosing cancer and providing the personalized therapy it often requires, is a collaborative effort more than in any other area of medicine. It involves a multidisciplinary team of oncologists, pathologists, radiologists, geneticists, and other specialists. Philips’ digital pathology solution includes whole-slide scanners, image management system, and proven implementation and support services to guide the transformation from analog to fully digital pathology workflows. Philips has already helped over 300 pathology labs implement digital pathology in their laboratories, helping pathologists to save time and collaborate virtually to deliver high-quality pathology reports and interact with other specialists in a patient’s multi-disciplinary care team.
510(k) clearance of latest pathology solution
Philips was first to market an FDA-approved digital pathology solution in 2017 and is the most widely deployed digital pathology solution for primary diagnosis around the world. The latest version, Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution 5.1 has now received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. The solution supports remote collaboration, and promotes teamwork, aiding diagnosis, boosting productivity, addressing staff shortages, and cutting costs. Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution, is comprehensive and scalable, integrating hardware, software, storage, analysis, and enterprise-wide connectivity, providing pathologists with fully integrated, end-to-end digital workflows. This seamless integration helps pathologists deliver accurate diagnoses, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
"Digital pathology is helping to revolutionize how we diagnose and potentially treat cancer. With the 510(k) approval we expand our ability to help pathology laboratories transform to fully digital workflows, saving time and easing the burden on pathologists and patients,” said Martijn Hartjes, Clinical Informatics Business Leader at Philips. “We are advancing the digital transformation in pathology and multi-disciplinary clinical collaboration between pathologists, radiologists, oncologists, and other healthcare professionals, empowering clinicians with the tools they need to deliver improved patient outcomes and care.”
Digital workflows help enhance productivity
Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution helps to shorten the time taken to review, report, and sign-off cases, as well as allowing pathologists to work remotely. The flexibility and efficiency improvement it delivers (up to 21% greater efficiency [1] than traditional analog workflows) help mitigate today’s chronic shortage of trained pathologists as well as reducing costs. For commercial providers and hospital pathology departments alike, it offers a route to meet growing demand.
By allowing pathologists to remotely collaborate with colleagues for second opinions and expert knowledge, or leverage the latest cloud-based AI applications, clinicians can deliver timely precision diagnoses that improve patient outcomes. And by securely lifting data out of the confines of the pathology lab, relevant data is accessible to care teams at every stage of a patient’s journey. Philips’ open-platform approach and ability to securely share data also facilitates medical research with the potential to develop new diagnostic algorithms, disease biomarkers and treatment options based on large-scale digital pathology data sets.
Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution also provides an end-to-end digital solution capable of securely leveraging cloud-based services to allow integration of advanced third-party AI-driven diagnostic applications [2]. For example, a combination of Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution and Ibex Medical Analytics’ AI software used to detect prostate cancer resulted in 27% efficiency gains that translated into a 37% productivity gain [3] and very high accuracy levels across multiple tissue types [4,5].
Since 2013, Philips has helped more than 300 customers implement digital pathology in their laboratories and over 20 hospital pathology laboratories go fully digital, meaning that pathology slides are digitally scanned, digital diagnosis is the default workflow for the laboratory, and the majority of the lab’s pathologists work digitally from anywhere.
For more information: www.philips.com
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[1] Results are specific to the institutions where they were obtained and may not reflect the results achievable at other institutions.
[2] PIPS enables iSyntax files, and with the Software Development Kit (SDK) third party companies can use this for AI capabilities.
[3] Raciti P, Sue J, Ceballos R, et al. Novel artificial intelligence system increases the detection of prostate cancer in whole slide images of core needle biopsies. Mod Pathol. 2020 Oct;33(10):2058-2066. doi: 10.1038/s41379-020-0551-y. Epub 2020 May 11. PMID: 32393768; PMCID: PMC9235852. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9235852/
[4] Sandbank et al., npj Breast Cancer, December 2022
[5] Sandbank et al, Modern Pathology 2022, 35,513-514
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