PathXL (formerly i-Path), a leading provider of Digital Pathology Workflow solutions, and Visiopharm, a technology leader in Whole Slide Image Analysis solutions, today announced the completion of integration between PathXL™ Manager and Visiopharm’s Tissuemorph and Visiomorph toolkits, enabling users across the pathology community to incorporate Image Analysis seamlessly into their collaborative programmes.

The integration provides an open system that streamlines workflows within the lab, as well as between labs with different scanning platforms. It provides a common platform that can be used with all major slide scanner formats, thereby facilitating cross-platform collaboration and leaving users free to choose whichever scanner platform they prefer.

PathXL’s management software and suite of specific applications enable users to upload, archive, search, share, collaborate and report on huge volumes of pathology data without worrying about performance, security or ease of use and without getting locked into expensive proprietary standards and systems .  PathXL can either be provided fully deployed on the customer’s site or as a hosted service over the web. This hosted option allows users to realise the full benefits of digital pathology, without major capital investment and without the need to support the solution in-house.

Visiopharm’s software provides efficient tools for extracting morphometric data from Whole Slide Images.  It is designed specifically for Pathologists, providing simple controls for identification, classification, and quantification of nuclei, membrane, cytoplasm and other structures of relevance.   It allows pathologists to work in true stain space (through colour de-convolution).  The technology is based on some of the most recent breakthrough research in image analysis and pattern recognition; and the software has been designed to reduce both the cost of learning and the cost of computing.  

The combination of these two solutions announced today, will allow users of Digital Pathology to benefit from a complete Digital Pathology solution. 

Des Speed, CEO of PathXL said ‘It is clear that Research customers are increasingly turning to Image Analysis tools, and naturally expect to be able to use these tools like any other - managing, sharing and collaborating with Image Analysis results in the same way as they do for standard digital pathology images and metadata.   From the outset, we’ve built our PathXL web platform to meet the highest architectural and usability standards - intuitive, robust, fast and secure, and also flexible and open to ensure future-proofing, whatever new applications and processes emerge.  We see Visiopharm as sharing the same philosophy and setting the same high standards in their specialist market, so we believe this collaboration enables customers to get the best of both worlds – great Image Analysis on a great Platform!’ 

Michael Grunkin, CEO of Visiopharm said ‘The ability to support complete workflows is becoming increasingly important, as pathologists seek to extract significant return on the investment from Digital Pathology. The open platform philosophy underpinning the solutions provided by both of our companies, will make it a lot easier for pathologists to choose best-of-breed solutions for analysis and data management and integrate them into one coherent workflow.  We believe that this will become increasingly important, not just internally in a research lab, but also in cross-platform collaborative efforts between different research groups.’

An example of the PathXL Visiopharm integrated image analysis system.

About PathXL

PathXL specialises in web-based software and workflows for Digital Pathology.  Its PathXL™ Manager product provides a robust, secure and open web-based platform to enable digital pathology users across all fields to manage, view and collaborate around virtual slides easily and efficiently.  In addition, PathXL provides a range of applications and workflows on top of PathXL™ Manager to deliver specific solutions to pathologists, scientists and students in Education, Research, Clinical and Biobanking settings.  PathXL also provides a full range of supporting services, including scanning, hosting, image analysis and consultancy.  PathXL operates in the UK, Europe and North America.