The Daily Scan

And looking at the Daily Scan, a few of them are obvious; the blog’s tagline used to be "Aperio’s daily news and views about Virtual Microscopy"; we have enlarged and refined our focus and as you may know the company tagline is "Bringing Digital Pathology to Life", and so I changed the blog tagline to "Digital Pathology" as well.  The difference being, Virtual Microscopy is the technology of scanning and digitizing microscope slides, while Digital Pathology is the field that includes all the software and tools for displaying, managing, and analyzing the resulting images, including managing all the metadata that apply to the specimens….

Another change is our logo; the logo at left had served us well for many years, but a little over a year ago we switched to the logo you see at the upper right.  It is a bit cooler, and [we think] portrays us as a bigger company.  And we are a bigger company; Aperio has grown a lot, we have about 120 employees now, and have placed over 350 systems in 25 countries.  That’s pretty amazing.  And a lot of that growth has taken place in the last two years.

Which brings me to perhaps the biggest change, which might be the least obvious from the outside; Aperio is now a medical device company.  In order to seek FDA clearance on our systems, we had to transform our processes to be compliant with FDA Quality System Requirements.  This affected every part of the company, from product marketing to engineering to quality assurance and testing to manufacturing to customer support.  It was not easy (!), but it has paid off; not only have we received FDA clearances for key applications, we have many more in various stages, including some cool clinical trials to show the value of Digital Pathology in real world lab environments.

So there have been a lot of changes – and will be many more – please stay tuned…"