Recently, Royal Philips Electronics and NEC Corporation have announced the signing of an agreement under which the two companies will jointly develop and market highly integrated digital pathology solutions.

These innovative digital pathology solutions will be designed to use advanced digital techniques to add quantitative analysis to the qualitative information derived from the visual inspection of pathology slides, which is currently the standard procedure. They will initially be targeted to assist in the grading of breast cancer and prostate cancer.

"Reliable computer-aided identification of regions of interest, based on the morphology of potentially cancerous cells in stained tissue samples, clearly depends on having high quality images to work with", said Tadashi Higashino, Senior Vice President at NEC.

"With its e-Pathology system, NEC already has an impressive position in the digital pathology market in Japan and is well positioned to duplicate that success in many other parts of the world," said Perry van Rijsingen, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Philips Healthcare Incubator. 

Philips‘ ultra-fast slide scanner, which is already commercially available only in Europe for research purposes, employs a unique ‘continuous auto-focus‘ technology that accurately follows height variations in the tissue surface over horizontal distances as short as 30 microns, allowing extremely high definition full-slide images to be captured in under one minute per slide.
 
Philips and NEC aim to produce initial development results from their joint development in digital pathology within the current year.