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Roche, Ibex, AWS Trifecta To Bring AI To Pathology
Biotech giant Roche is partnering with medical analytics firm Ibex and the Amazon Web Services cloud to bring advanced AI algorithms to the area of digital pathology.
According to Roche, digital pathology involves the "digitalisation of the traditional pathology workflow starting from slide scanning to visualisation to analysis." To wit:
Digital pathology is transforming traditional histopathology by improving efficiency, depth of analysis, and providing an opportunity for collaboration in pathology workflows. The integrated artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools can be applied to help enhance clinical decision support, improve productivity and shorten turnaround time in pathology laboratories.
As part of the three companies' collaboration, Roche's navify Digital Pathology platform, which aims to improve digital pathology workflows, will be able to tap into Ibex's AI algorithms, which are primed to help pathologists identify signs of breast and prostrate cancers.
Combined, the two companies' technologies can potentially help clinicians diagnose those cancers more quickly in patients, while streamlining health services delivery by using a unified platform to store, access and collaborate on patient data.
"This exciting collaboration brings powerful AI solutions to pathology labs," said Roche Digital Pathology's Michael Rivers in a prepared statement late last month. "Using the navify Digital Pathology platform pathologists can securely access third-party AI-powered technology alongside Roche's growing menu of AI-based image analysis tools in an efficient clinical workflow."
Underpinning the Roche-Ibex integration is the AWS cloud, which offers a multitude of data compute, storage and analytics solutions specifically for medical workloads. According to Roche, already an AWS customer, housing the Roche-Ibex integration on AWS "provides customers with flexibility, security, computing capacity, responsiveness and confidence to accelerate the adoption of digital pathology and AI."
Roche foresees the cloud will be necessary to help health services providers scale their offerings to larger populations, especially as cancer rates increase.
"As cancer incidence and pathology workloads continue to increase globally," the company said, "cloud-based services enable laboratories and health systems to safely, reliably and cost-effectively scale up the volume of slide images they analyse, roll out new applications, add new digitised sites to their network, and expand to new geographies."