SlidePath.com

At the IAP 2008 meeting last October in Athens I had the good fortune to hear Dr. Lynne Dobson speak about her work with whole slides, TMAs and HER2, interests of mine as well which I presented in the same seminar on digital pathology at the meeting. 

Several years ago while attending APIII in Pittsburgh I met Dr. Sean Costello who at the time developed a virtual pathology slide that among other deliverables was used as an evaluation tool in telepathology.

Both are colleagues at a company called SlidePath which was founded in 2003 as a commercial spin-off from Dublin City University, Ireland, and has grown rapidly to become a major international player in the deployment of software solutions for digital pathology, medical e-learning and clinical information management. With offices in Ireland, UK, Sweden, Australia and now expanding to the US, SlidePath employ 25 staff, most with higher degrees in research.

As of this month, SlidePath has established the company's first corporate presence in the United States. The facility at 345 Park Avenue, NY is strategically placed to serve east coast opportunities for the company's products and services. They feel this will allow them to further accelerate revenue growth and establish a technology base in institutes of world renown.

The suite of products they offer is quite extensive and visionary.  More information can be found at www.slidepath.com

SlidePath Profile

SlidePath boasts a client base of more than 70 customers in 10 countries for their products and services including a number of high profile sites such as Breakthrough Breast Cancer UK, Royal College of Physicians Ireland, University College London, Kings College London, Erasmus Medical Centre, EORTC, Royal College of Pathologists Australasia and Animal Health Australia.

SlidePath offer a broad range of multi-format image compliant web-enabled products widely regarded as the world’s best digital pathology software:

Digital Slidebox is an e-learning suite for the creation of electronic archives of digital slides with significant didactic value. Its easy to use interface enables users to create heavily annotated case studies with embedded narratives, and associate hyperlinks, multimedia files and detailed questionnaires. Using Digital Slidebox, trainees may access archived digital slides, documentation, and presentations anytime, anywhere from an Internet enabled PC. In addition, comprehensive administrator functionality enables statistical analysis and heat-mapping capabilities to individually review the regions of slides examined by each student.

Distiller is the most powerful web based data collection and management tool with comprehensive reporting, surveillance and networking capabilities. Distiller is designed for a wide variety of laboratory and clinical research settings and is ideal for the management of life-science and clinical datasets. Its comprehensive user and data management features facilitates online real-time collaboration amongst disparate research groups and the intuitive data presentation and powerful data mining functionality can significantly accelerate the rate of biomarker/drug discovery.

Distiller’s additional plug-in module OpTMA removes the work involved in analyzing TMA’s, automating the entire process of de-arraying and associating tissue cores with clinical data. As de-arraying is virtual, the original digital slide is never disrupted, with cores “extracted” from digital slides on demand. This reduces storage requirements and allows the original TMA section to be viewed at any time for validation purposes. OpTMA enables users to consolidate scoring data from multiple reviewers and SlidePath’s virtual array technology allows users to build virtual patient centric biomarker arrays.

SlidePath’s newest technological development is a computer-aided image analysis solution, Tissue IA, which enables automated identification and quantification of tissue-based biomarkers in immunohistochemically stained full face sections, TMAs or annotated regions of slides. SlidePath offer HER-2, nuclear, membrane, intracellular and positive pixel detection algorithms optimized across a wide range of tissue types and disease states that output a range of customizable and extendable in-situ measurements.