Healthcare systems are struggling with a pathologist shortfall. In the US, the number of active pathologists dropped by 18 percent from 2007 to 2017; in South Korea, 65 pathology residency slots were available in 2020 but only seven graduates enrolled. At the same time, laboratories must manage the ever-growing oncology workload associated with rising cancer rates and increasing calls for early detection – potentially leading to situations that do not make careful diagnoses possible. Deep Bio believes these challenges can be overcome with the power of artificial intelligence (AI) – providing objective and quantified slide analyses and supporting pathologists to make better informed decisions faster and more consistently.
Deep Bio’s first tool, DeepDx® Prostate, analyzes and assesses H&E-stained prostate biopsy slides to detect cancer – analyzing multi-gigapixel whole-slide images in under 30 seconds. At the same time, it provides clinically meaningful information regarding cancer localization and severity, including percentages of each Gleason score and pattern and total tumor and tissue length. This vastly reduces time and effort on the pathologists’ part – improving workflow efficiency and accuracy.
The software assists pathologists by highlighting Gleason patterns 3, 4, and 5, where present, with different colored overlays. The gland-level segmentation of these overlays permits pixel-level accuracy of key metrics such as total tumor-to-tissue ratios and Gleason pattern-to-tumor ratios. DeepDx® Prostate has also been validated in a clinical study published in Cancers, yielding high concordance compared with reference standard generated by three board-certified pathologists, with a quadratic-weighted Cohen’s kappa coefficient of 0.907; 99 percent sensitivity; and 94 percent specificity. It demonstrates that the software can provide specialist-level support to pathologists.
DeepDx® Prostate for quality control and research and development empowers pathologists to make more accurate and consistent decisions with faster turnarounds, enabling improved workflows. “This tool is very helpful for quality assurance, enabling pathologists to re-assess areas that they did not annotate originally, but which the AI algorithm indicated as areas of interest,” says Hillel Kahane, Founder of StarPath, New York, USA, and a user of DeepDx® Prostate.
Moreover, Deep Bio is dedicated to developing innovative solutions in the digital healthcare sector and has active collaborations with renowned universities and laboratories around the world. At the 2021 annual meeting of the American Urological Association, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine presented two posters featuring analyses by DeepDx® Prostate – providing external validation of the algorithm and utility of the software in measuring concordance in tumor detection between preoperative MRI and prostatectomy histopathology. Results demonstrated high performance of DeepDx® Prostate in diagnosing and grading cancer on prostatectomy specimens. Recently approved by the University of Utah’s Institutional Review Board, the company plans to conduct a prospective study to validate the performance of DeepDx® Prostate with ARUP Laboratories, a leading reference laboratory in the US.
*DeepDx® Prostate is for Research Use Only.
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