From digital microscopy to digital pathology through image analysis. How far have we come in 20 years?

In part one of our special two part podcast celebrating our twentieth anniversary, hear from Visiopharm founder and CEO Michael Grunkin.

Visiopharm is a company offering image analysis software used on pathology images. The software has been on the market for over 20 years and has evolved through the transition of digital microscopy to digital pathology. Digital microscopy provided static tissue images captured through the microscope camera and only branched out into digital pathology with the wider availability and adoption of whole slide scanners. Image analysis spans digital microscopy and digital pathology, and image analysis methods had to evolve in parallel with the imaging technologies to address the hypercomplex pathology problems.

The complexity of digital pathology problems and research questions increases with every additional stain and scientific discovery. Visiopharm’s team challenged themselves with providing an image analysis solution capable of addressing this hypercomplexity and enabling researchers to advance scientifically with their tool.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities applied to computer vision problems took tissue image analysis to a whole new level and incorporating AI into the Visiopharm software tremendously increased the accessibility of this method.

In addition to the two well-known technologies that enabled digital pathology breakthroughs (whole slide imaging and AI) two other important advancements happened during the last two decades:

• emphasis on interoperability between different digital pathology systems
• advances in the field of data visualisation

Together these four components are driving the progress of digital pathology both on the diagnostic and research front.

During the last 20 years Visiopharm grew significantly, both organically and through funding and they continue creating value and powerful image analysis tools for the tissue image analysis community.

Listen to the full episode with Visiopharm’s CEO Michael Grunkin to learn more about this 20-year perspective on what happened in the field of digital microscopy and digital pathology.