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| Halo image analysis software--Screenshot courtesy of Indica Labs |
Philips ($PHG) announced that it will offer Indica Labs' Halo image analysis software platform with its Digital Pathology Solutions products to enable enhanced analysis of cancerous tissue samples. The upgraded product offering is for research use only, meaning it won't be used to make clinical decisions affecting individual patients.
"Digital pathology is the stepping stone to unlock the huge potential of data mining," said Perry van Rijsingen, general manager of Philips Digital Pathology Solutions, in a release. "More information from tissue samples could bring new insights in cancer care that support personal treatment, and ultimately will save patients' lives."
The companies say Indica's Halo image analysis platform will increase speed and productivity, and improve quality by resulting in information not available via a conventional microscope. According to the product website, Halo mines and reports data on millions of individual cells and "maintains an interactive link between cell metrics and cell imagery."
Meanwhile, Philips Digital Pathology Solutions unit aims to analyze and digitize the images that pathologists typically view through a microscope. The company says researchers can use its upgraded digital pathology research tool to study various cancer subtypes like HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67.
"Digital pathology offers significant opportunity to arm scientists in oncology and pathology with the quantitative information they need in their research to improve the cancer care process," Indica CEO Steven Hashagen said in the release. "By incorporating the high-quality innovation of Philips' digital imaging and our precision HALO analysis platform, they have the tools to further investigate the predictive response of certain therapy with the ultimate goal to provide a personalized cancer treatment plan."
According to Indica's website, the company serves pharmaceutical, healthcare and research partners by providing high-throughput, whole-slide image quantification.
The integration of technology like Halo is transforming the world of pathology. The subspecialty of medicine used to be based on qualitative visual inspection, and still is to a large extent, but computers are increasingly crunching Big Data to calculate quantitative outputs based on the tissue samples.
- read the release
- here's the Halo product website
- more on Philips' pathology unit