American and European firms team up to improve breast cancer imaging

Two healthcare technology companies have struck up a transatlantic partnership in an effort to improve breast cancer diagnostic imaging in Europe. U.S.-based Visiopharm said in a statement it will combine its analysis software with Netherlands-based Royal Philips’ imaging programs, aiming to “boost breast cancer diagnosis objectivity.”

The statement explained that physicians will get a clearer idea of the properties of breast tumors, hopefully leading to more precise diagnoses and therefore more effective treatments. The high-quality images produced by Royal Philips’ technology combined with Visiopharms algorithm for analyzing those pictures will show a different view of a tumor than just a physician looking under a microscope, the companies explained in the statement.

“Rapid advances in digital imaging coupled with the use of powerful new analytic methods promise to radically change the future of pathology. Combining the high image quality from Philips’ IntelliSite pathology solution with Visiopharm’s reagent agnostic diagnostic image analysis is the first step towards improving data quality in histopathology,” said Visiopharm CEO Michael Grunkin, MD.

And developers also said they hope the new technology closes subjectivity gaps between different physicians in different labs looking breast cancer images, especially with tests involving the HER2 cancer biomarker by digitally looking for its presence instead of manually.