Digital Pathology System Aids Primary Diagnosis

A small footprint, high throughput digital pathology scanner allows slides to be available for remote viewing in less than a minute.

The Leica Biosystems (Vista, CA, USA) Aperio AT2 400-slide capacity brightfield scanner is designed to support a sustained high throughput rate of 50 slides per hour. The highly reliable autoloader, with a 400-slide capacity, can capture and prepare digitized slides from an entire carousel in less than eight hours, thanks to a smaller file size and faster scanning with skip blank stripes technology. Other features include Z-stacking with up to 25 layers and a light emitting diode (LED) light source with calibration controls that ensure consistent, high quality scanning.

An adjustable tissue finder allows the area of interest to be adjusted in order to optimize findings on difficult samples (such as fatty tissue), or to be programmed to not detect ink or stain residues. A pathologist's cockpit, clinical image management software that runs on the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system, and easy integration into laboratory information systems (LIS) provides an integrated digital pathology workflow solution.

“Leica Biosystems has always had a commitment to rapid and sustained innovation in this space. We bring to bear deep product expertise, as well as comprehensive IT implementation skills for seamless customer installs,” said Jerome Clavel, vice president and general manager of pathology imaging at Leica Biosystems. “The digital pathology market is growing very quickly; by leveraging our commercial presence in over 100 countries, we have now built an installed base of 2,000 systems. China and North America stand out with over 400 installs over the last 24 months alone.”

Digital pathology is an image-based information environment enabled by computer technology that allows for the management of information generated from a digital slide. It is enabled in part by virtual microscopy (the conversion of glass slides into digital slides) that can be viewed, managed, shared and analyzed on a computer monitor. With the advent of whole-slide imaging, digital pathology is currently regarded as one of the most promising avenues of diagnostic medicine.