Collaboration to Build Digital Pathology Algorithms

(Gerd Altmann, Pixabay)

11 Mar. 2022. The Cleveland Clinic and PathAI, a company developing digital pathology systems, are partnering on creating new diagnostic and analytical algorithms. Cleveland Clinic is taking an equity stake in PathAI, but other financial and intellectual property details of the five year collaboration were not disclosed.

PathAI develops digital pathology tools based on artificial intelligence for research and clinical applications. The company’s main focus is precision medicine that relies on genomics-based diagnostics tied to personalized treatment plans. A key goal of PathAI’s systems is to minimize subjectivity that reduces the accuracy of findings. The company says its systems combine A.I. with image analysis to improve the reproducibility of diagnostics from pathological samples, and help analytics based on digital pathology better predict outcomes of therapies.

“Accelerate innovation in precision pathology”

In the partnership, Cleveland Clinic and PathAI plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of pathology specimens, producing millions of slide images covering multiple diseases. The digitized images, say the parties, will then be linked to clinical and molecular data to produce datasets for research using PathAI’s pathology algorithms and other systems. Data produced from the collaboration will be used to further refine PathAI’s algorithms, with Cleveland Clinic’s professional staff verifying the algorithms work as intended. In addition, PathAI will educate Cleveland Clinic staff in using A.I. pathology-based diagnostics in patient care.

“By doing this work,” says Brian Rubin, chair of pathology and laboratory medicine at Cleveland Clinic in a statement, “we’re able to maximize the value of machine learning for our patients and fuel deeper innovation that can result in better outcomes.”

Andy Beck, CEO and co-founder of PathAI adds, “We see an incredible opportunity to accelerate innovation in precision pathology and to use our strengths to bridge communities in the health care ecosystem including patients, biopharma, and academic research.”

PathAI is a six year-old company founded by Beck, a pathologist on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and MIT data scientist Aditya Khosla. In June 2016, soon after starting up PathAI, Science & Enterprise reported on Khosla and colleagues developing an inexpensive eye-tracking device called iTracker that uses a tablet camera, aided by image analysis and crowd-sourced machine learning algorithms.

More from Science & Enterprise:

• AI-Aided Disease Mgmt App Raises $3.8M in Seed Funds
• Trial Assessing AI-Aided Blood Test for Early Stage Cancer
• Digital Neuroscience Companies Partner on AR/AI Diagnostics
• NIH Small Biz Grant Supports Uterine Health Diagnostic
• Saliva Test, App for Stress Levels Unveiled

We designed Science & Enterprise for busy readers including investors, researchers, entrepreneurs, and students. Except for a narrow cookies and privacy strip for first-time visitors, we have no pop-ups blocking the page, nor distracting animated GIF graphics. If you want to subscribe for daily email alerts, you can do that here, or find the link in the upper left-hand corner of the desktop page. The site is free, with no paywall. But, of course, donations are gratefully accepted.

*     *     *