Royal Philips, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Ibex Medical Analytics, Tel Aviv, Israel, announced a strategic collaboration to jointly promote their digital pathology and AI solutions to hospitals, health networks, and pathology labs worldwide. The combination of Philips digital pathology solution (Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution) and Ibex’s Galen AI-powered cancer diagnostics platform, currently in clinical use in Europe and the Middle East, empowers pathologists to generate objective, reproducible results, increase diagnostic confidence, and enable the productivity and efficiency improvements needed to cope with ever-increasing demand for pathology-based diagnostics.
This announcement marks the latest extension to Philips’ AI-enabled Precision Diagnosis solutions portfolio, which leverages Philips and third-party AI solutions to deliver cutting-edge clinical decision support and optimized workflows.
The trend toward centralized pathology labs, the global shortage of trained pathologists, and increasing demands on histopathology posed by the growing number of cancer patients, leads pathology labs to actively seek efficiency-enhancing solutions that enable to maintain high accuracy levels. Digital pathology, enabled by solutions such as Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution, has already been shown to improve pathology lab productivity by 25%, while also allowing remote image reading by specialists and the immediate sharing of images with referring hospitals as part of comprehensive pathology reports. Ibex’s AI-powered Galen platform further streamlines workflow and improves accuracy via automated case prioritization, cancer heatmaps, grading, and other productivity-enhancing tools.
“Building on our strong portfolio to support clinical decision-making in oncology, we bring together the power of imaging, pathology, genomics, and longitudinal data with insights from artificial intelligence (AI) to help empower clinicians to deliver clear care pathways with predictable outcomes for every patient,” says Kees Wesdorp, chief business leader, Precision Diagnosis at Philips. “By teaming with Ibex to incorporate their AI into our digital pathology solutions, we’re further able to provide a continuous pathway, where critical patient data is made visible to both pathologists and oncologists to help improve the clinician experience and patient outcomes.”
“Pathology is transforming at an increasing pace and AI is one of the major drivers, supporting a more rapid and accurate cancer diagnosis,” says Joseph Mossel, CEO and co-founder of Ibex Medical Analytics. “By joining forces with Philips, the leader in digital pathology deployments, we can offer new end-to-end solutions enabling pathologists to implement integrated, AI-powered workflows across a broader segment of the diagnostic pathway, improving the quality of patient care and strengthening the business case for digitization.”
Ibex’s Galen platform adds AI-powered cancer detection, case prioritization, grading, and other productivity-enhancing insights. Users have reported significant improvements in diagnostic efficiency, with 27% reduction in time-to-diagnosis compared to conventional microscope viewing, 1- to 2-day reductions in total turnaround time, and 37% productivity gain.
In addition to cancer, the AI platform supports pathologists in the accurate grading, as well as detection and diagnosis, of multiple clinical features, such as tumor size, perineural invasion, high-grade PIN (Prostatic Intraepithelial Neoplasia), and more. The accuracy level of Galen Prostate for cancer detection was the highest level reported in the field, with a sensitivity rate of 98.46%, specificity of 97.33% and an AUC of 0.991. When used as an automated ‘second read,’ the platform alerts pathologists when discrepancies between their diagnosis and the AI algorithm’s findings are detected, providing a safety net against error or misdiagnosis, previously reported as high as 12%, and increasing overall quality of care.
“We have been using Philips’ IntelliSite Pathology Solution together with Ibex’s Galen platform as part of our routine practice since 2020, and this ‘second read’ implementation has already helped us improve our diagnostic quality,” says Delphine Raoux, MD, pathologist and head of innovation technologies at Medipath, the largest network of private pathology labs in France. “The work we presented recently showed that Ibex’s AI platform can further provide significant productivity gains when used during primary diagnosis and helps us reduce total turnaround time. This is an important step forward as we look for new technologies that can help meet an increasing demand for pathology services and could enable seamless remote reading of biopsies in times of covid restrictions.”
For more information, visit Philips and Ibex Medical Analytics.
Featured image: Philips digital pathology (Courtesy: Philips)
