Proscia and UMC Utrecht Establish Center of Excellence to Accelerate Adoption of Computational Pathology in Clinical Practice

Collaboration to Highlight Impact of Cutting-Edge Artificial Intelligence Applications in Routine, High-Throughput Pathology Workflows

Proscia, a leading provider of AI-enabled digital pathology solutions, and Dutch hospital University Medical Center Utrecht (UMC Utrecht), a pioneer in the adoption of routine digital pathology, are collaborating to establish a Center of Excellence to advance the use of computational pathology in clinical practice. The Center of Excellence will validate the efficacy of Proscia’s AI applications and deploy them into high-throughput pathology workflows to drive quality and efficiency gains. In doing so, it will demonstrate best practices for the broader adoption of computational pathology amongst diagnostic laboratories.

The standard of care for diagnosing diseases like cancer is the pathologist’s assessment of tissue biopsies using the microscope. This 150-year-old manual and subjective practice cannot keep pace with the rising cancer burden amid a declining pathologist population. Laboratories are quickly adopting digital pathology to successfully overcome many of these systemic challenges. They are also increasingly implementing AI to realize even more value from their digital data, driving further productivity gains and expanding the breadth of critical diagnostic information available to improve patient outcomes.

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Delivering computational pathology applications for high-throughput laboratory settings requires massive amounts of data and rigorous validation to ensure that they can overcome the pre-analytical variability seen in practice. Through the collaboration, Proscia and UMC Utrecht will build one of the largest de-identified data sets for pathology research to date. The partners will also generate clinical and economic evidence demonstrating the capacity of Proscia’s AI applications to achieve their intended purposes across multiple laboratory settings.

“At UMC Utrecht, we believe that computational pathology will have an unprecedented impact on the way we diagnose and treat patients,” said Paul van Diest, Head of the Department of Pathology. “We are excited to establish this Center of Excellence with Proscia, a leader in AI-enabled digital pathology, to see through our vision and ultimately improve the quality of our practice.”

As one of the earliest adopters of digital pathology, UMC Utrecht will deploy Proscia’s computational pathology applications leveraging the company’s Concentriq® Dx platform to highlight the impact of AI in delivering meaningful quality, efficiency, and productivity gains. CE-marked for use in primary diagnosis in Europe and available for remote use in clinical practice in the United States during the COVID-19 public health emergency, Concentriq Dx is used by leading commercial and academic laboratories to view, manage, and analyze whole slide images at an enterprise scale.

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“Computational applications are poised to transform the practice of pathology; yet research alone is not enough to bring them into practice to drive this change,” said Arun Ananth, Executive Vice President of Global Growth at Proscia. “We are pleased to establish a Center of Excellence with UMC Utrecht, an institution at the intersection of research and clinical practice, to go beyond validation and to highlight the value of AI-enabled digital pathology in routine diagnostic workflows.”

In establishing the Center of Excellence, UMC Utrecht joins the growing list of academic and commercial laboratories with which Proscia is working to advance the use of computational pathology. In February 2020, Proscia released the results of one of the largest and most comprehensive validation studies performed in computational pathology to date, conducted in collaboration with Dermatopathology Laboratory of Central States, University of Florida, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, in support of the June 2019 release of its DermAI™ application for dermatopathology. It has also recently announced data collaborations with University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

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