At this year's Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual meeting in Orlando, Philips announced a new partnership with cloud-computing platform designer Amazon Web Services, geared toward scaling the capacity of providers to store and incorporate ever-growing amounts of digital pathology data in ways that allow for more informed diagnoses and better productivity.

In today’s clinical environment, providers are searching for solutions to help manage increasing digital pathology data necessary for large-scale clinical trials, multi-institute studies, and care collaboration in complex cases such as cancer. To aid in this effort, Philips will be combining its IntelliSite Pathology technology with AWS HealthImaging and Amazon Bedrock solutions.

“Secure cloud-based offerings address the growing demand to store and utilize more data, and by digitizing pathology, healthcare leaders can apply AI and ML to drive better insights,” said Tehsin Syed, GM of Health AI at AWS, in a statement.

Philips IntelliSite Pathology combines hardware, software, and storage necessary for enterprise-wide infrastructures and can be integrated with AI applications to improve and make productivity more affordable. Cleared by the FDA in 2017, it is the first whole-slide imaging system for reviewing and interpreting digital surgical pathology slides prepared from biopsied tissue.

Used by builders of cloud-native medical imaging applications, AWS HealthImaging optimizes storage, increases scale, advances pathology image analysis, and simplifies clinical workflows. It provides access to authoritative copies of data with no image duplicates and facilitates information retrieval in milliseconds. The pixel data of each file is encoded as High-Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K), a state-of-the-art image compression codec for lossless compression and scaling resolution, and pixel data encoding and metadata normalization are performed automatically, reducing migration costs.

Amazon Bedrock uses foundation models, which are trained on large unlabeled data sets and used for application development, to create cloud-based generative AI solutions for clinical decision support, to develop and integrate AI applications for accurate diagnoses, and automate administrative tasks. It also expands processing for PACS images, simplifies clinical workflows and voice recognition, and develops machine learning-based applications quickly.

The combined solution can be used alongside Philips HealthSuite Imaging on AWS, which uses the scalability and security of the cloud to allow radiologists to access up-to-date features from any location while reducing the need for the on-premises hardware and data centers conventionally used to host image management platforms. Philips and AWS partnered on this endeavor last year to support remote reading and reporting among radiologists.

Together, these systems will facilitate quicker access to images from any location, streamlining entire workflows across enterprise imaging, from diagnosis to treatment options and follow-up.

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