Philips and Mount Sinai to Create Digital Pathology Database

Royal Philips Electronics (Eindhoven, The Netherland) has partnered with Mount Sinai Health System (MSHS; New York, NY, USA) to create a new digital pathology database and analytics.

The partnership between the two organizations is intended to jointly create a modern digital image repository of patient tissue samples and data analytics, with the goal of advancing clinical research to provide solutions for complex diseases, including cancer. The database will be based on hundreds of thousands of tissue samples stored at MSHS in the form of glass tissue slides over many years. The partners will use the samples to create a comprehensive digital image repository, based on digital scans of all slides.

Additional data will be gathered from whole slide pathology images, clinical laboratory services, genetic analysis, radiology, and surgical and molecular pathology data repositories, and the insights gleaned will be used to develop predictive analytics software to unlock pathology data.

“The digitization of pathology gives us the unprecedented opportunity to access vast amounts of unlocked data and view it within the context of other images, results and clinical information,” said Frans van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips Electronics. “It is our vision that our improved understanding of these data will help us enable better, more individualized care with greater confidence.”

“This collaboration with Philips has the potential to help drive a new paradigm in healthcare that includes the optimization of treatment efficacy and superior clinical outcomes,” said Carlos Cordon-Cardo, MD, chairman of the MSHS pathology system. “Our ultimate goal with this initiative is to translate data into knowledge to maximize personalized patient management.”

The MSHS combines the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and seven hospital campuses with a total of 3,535 beds. The system, which also includes 22 ambulatory surgical centers and 45 ambulatory care practices, serves approximately 170,000 inpatients and 2.6 million outpatients annually. The MSHS was created from the combination of The Mount Sinai Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners, which both agreed unanimously to combine the two entities in July 2013.

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