By John Vartanian

With Philips Healthcare’s breakthrough whole-slide imaging technology cleared by the FDA this past April, the potential applications appear limitless.

One of the most promising developments that will soon impact the day to day lives of pathologists is the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms into these powerful scanners. The algorithms will take the complete image of the slide and assess each pixel for worrisome abnormalities at a speed and accuracy impossible using current techniques. This is the promise of computer enhanced pathology, and it is coming not a moment too soon; projections show that the field of pathology is experiencing a staggering 25% decrease in the work force, and patient volumes continue to climb along with the aging population. Even with these irreconcilable trends, pathologists have been resistant to machine learning diagnostics due to reasonable fears of patient safety and job security.



The only effective approach to a reaching a solution is to partner with pathologists rather than replace them. This is the mantra of an exciting startup company coming out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, named MedKairos. Rather than aiming to outright replace the pathologist as other ventures have attempted, they have decided to help pathologists by automating the tedious process of biopsy quality control. Without this quality control measure in place, one out of every five biopsy procedures are repeated, with the financial costs felt directly by the hospital. This has forced many large cancer centers to adopt the labor-intensive process of biopsy quality control at the point of care. Current practice requires a pathologist to travel with their microscope to the biopsy suite, where they will manually count the cells in every pass of the needle to verify adequate tissue was collected to make a diagnosis. This process adds another task to the already over-worked pathologist’s schedule, and wastes valuable time that could be spent making more diagnoses. MedKairos has an automated platform that was developed for pathologists, by pathologists, that streamlines this process and allows the pathologist to spend their time doing that for which they were trained: making diagnoses.


MedKairos views this as the first step of marrying medicine and machine for the betterment of the care that we can provide for our patients. According to Michael Moore, the CEO of MedKairos, “Pathology is the cornerstone of diagnostics. Efforts to replace this critical position in the hospital with an automated system would destabilize current workflows, and no hospital is willing to take on that level of risk.” By taking an incremental approach to clinical acceptance, MedKairos has positioned themselves as the leader in the new age of machine learning in pathology. They have plans to maintain their advantage through a scheduled rollout of additional software to expand the utility of their platform to other tissue collection methods, and plan to incorporate benign biopsy triage to further address the needs of pathologists.

Considering the revolutionary technologies being developed, such as those by MedKairos, it is not a stretch to imagine the implications of integrating this data with that collected from radiology artificial intelligence, health care blockchains, and home health tracking. This style of holistic integration would lead to diagnostic decision making in a way not dissimilar to the current teachings of medical school curricula. By taking the physician partnership approach, these desperately needed technologies will be able to enhance the speed and quality of clinical decision-making and identify previously unseen patterns in patient populations, while never sacrificing the humanistic side of medicine. The leaders who will bring these technologies into the space of practicing medicine remain to be seen, but companies like MedKairos already have one foot in the door to the future of computer-enhanced medical care for patients across the globe.

About the author: John Vartanian was the founder as well as the president and CEO of Medical Imaging Resources for 23 years. Medical Imaging Resources provided high-end mobile and fixed-site imaging systems, MRI, CT, nuclear medicine and cardiac cath labs to the market for over two decades. John Vartanian has worked in the high-end imaging market since 1985.