News

Huron Digital Pathology Connects Pathologists, Researchers and Educators to the Expertise of their Colleagues with New ‘Scan Index Search’ Platform

St. Jacobs, Ontario, Canada – March 12, 2019 – At the upcoming USCAP 2019 conference in Maryland, March 18-20, Huron Digital Pathology will debut its new ‘Scan Index Search’ platform, which connects pathologists, researchers and educators with the expertise of their colleagues to help speed up diagnosis and accelerate disease research.

“Every year, pathologists collectively diagnose millions of cases, using their expertise to review biopsy slides and generate knowledge-rich, pathology reports. By embedding intelligence into Huron’s scanning hardware and combining it with our image search engine, we believe we can transform how pathologists, researchers and educators around the world capture and share knowledge,” said Patrick Myles, CEO of Huron Digital Pathology. “Image search is a fundamental capability that can make ‘virtual peer review’ a reality, providing access to the knowledge of multiple experts, virtually, through their pathology reports. Equally significant, image search can establish a reliable framework for building computational consensus, which will have a great and lasting benefit to the practice of pathology and society in general.”

At the USCAP 2019 conference, Huron will showcase the three main components of its Scan Index Search platform for pathology:

Scan. The company is debuting a new 400-slide capacity scanner, TissueScope iQ. In addition to standard slides, the scanner accommodates up to 200 double-wide slides. Each of the scanner’s five standard or double-wide cartridges can be mixed and matched for greater scanning flexibility. TissueScope iQ features industry-first, real-time, native slide indexing. As slides are digitized, the intelligent scanner indexes the images, representing each slide as a series of compact and easily-searchable barcodes. Native indexing on the scanner will enable valuable, real-world applications for quality control and laboratory automation.

Index. Huron has developed a scanner-agnostic and IT-friendly method for indexing large archives of whole slide images so they can be quickly and easily searched. The technique is designed to batch-index existing digital slide archives and index new slides as they are added to the archive. The digital slides can either originate from Huron scanners, where they are indexed natively, or from third party scanners.

Search. Huron offers an easy-to-use search tool that pathologists, researchers and educators can use to retrieve images that are anatomically similar to the biopsy samples they are reviewing. After highlighting a region of interest on a digital slide, the search engine returns images with similar content along with the corresponding diagnoses. This search capability can be deployed within a single institution or across multiple networks.

Reference Architecture
Huron has co-developed a reference architecture for pathology in collaboration with Dell EMC, which enables its Scan Index Search Solution.