Industry

Digital storage, processing, and collaboration has long been considered the future of pathology. Practicing pathologists are relying more on collaborative efforts for unique cases. The use of digital slides is rapidly expanding to small hospitals and clinics that cannot afford trained oncologic pathologists. Furthermore, the rising trend in digital pathology can amount to significant cost savings because maintaining and sharing glass slides is an expensive practice. The unit cost alone of a cardboard tray can cost at minimum $14!

In industry, leading digital pathology companies include Aperio, BioImagene, and Omnyx. Currently, only a few digital applications have been approved by the FDA. One includes the digital analysis of HER immunohistochemical staining to assess breast cancer patients where Herceptin treatment is used. Aperio's ScanScope received FDA approval in October 2007 for its HER2 image analysis application which uses algorithms to quantify HER2 protein expression. In image cytometry, the automation of Pap smear analyses is offered by companies such as Ventana Medical Systems, TriPath Imaging, and Molecular Diagnostics (Cytocore service). This is important because roughly 160 million Pap smear tests are tested per year worldwide. Below are links to other digital pathology (or related) companies as well as digital pathology in the news including a business profile of Omnyx.