There is also natural variance among pathologists when using glass slides, and the researchers spent a year analyzing the variance on the same cases using a microscope.

“Pathology is a very interpretive discipline,” Snead said. “It's important to know what your existing variation is. Pathologists will naturally disagree.”


In the future, systems like the one developed by Omnyx will be able to help automate the process of separating normal and abnormal samples and even assist pathologists in grading some types of tumors.

Nasir Rajpoot, a computer scientist at the University of Warwick, has been working with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust (UHCW) to further develop the image analytics to use with the technology.

“Computer-assisted grading of cancer is an extremely challenging task,” Rajpoor told HCB News via email. “We are tackling this challenge together with our dedicated team of pathologists at UHCW, one cancer at a time. The process is not fully automated, and probably will never be. Having said that, we do expect our algorithms to be clinically available within the next two to three years for assisting the pathologists with more accurate and reproducible grading of certain cancers.”

Mamar Gelaye, the chief executive officer Omnyx, a joint venture between GE Healthcare and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), said that the technology can provide computational tools that help to support things such as pattern recognition.

“Obviously, these do not usurp the diagnostic responsibility of the pathologist, they really act as an enabling tool,” Gelaye told HCB News.

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