Partnering to improve personalized cancer care through digital pathology

“Digital transformation has proven successful for pathologists, allowing easier organization and more efficient workflows, with new functionalities like measurements and multiple-slide alignment providing better collaboration across the care team and helping improve the path to diagnosis,” says Dr. Julien Adam, Head of the Pathology Department at Saint-Joseph Hospital. "Through this partnership with Philips, we aim to integrate all our imaging data into an integrated diagnosis to enhance clinical decision-making and improve patient care. From a clinical standpoint, the availability of virtual slides during multidisciplinary meetings increases the involvement of pathologists to help us organize and optimize the analysis from sample to patient care, and ultimately build a gold standard for integrated diagnostics in oncology.”

The hospital group’s digital pathology experience with Philips began in 2020, and the two hospital sites generate around 150,000 slides each year. Dr. Adam says, “Digital transformation was successful for pathologists, and now most of them prefer to work digitally. Many cases require a second opinion or an expert discussion. Digital pathology also facilitates education and training of pathologists. Digital pathology makes microscopic images much more accessible and creates new opportunities for partnerships by taking pathology to the digital age and increasing our collaboration with medical imaging.”

The team sees the availability of virtual slides during multidisciplinary meetings as increasing the involvement of pathologists, which provides value for patient care through optimizing the analysis performed by pathologists.

The goal is to integrate all imaging data within the clinical context into an integrated diagnosis as a valuable approach to guide clinical decision-making and improve patient care. Dr. Marc Zins, Head of Radiology and Chief Medical Officer of the hospital group, says, “Regarding integrated diagnosis, what we foresee is the image of a puzzle. Each part of the puzzle represents one of the diagnoses that is made by pathology or radiology or biology, and by assembling this puzzle we are able to have a personalized approach to our patient’s disease. The main goal is finally to improve patient care.”

Régis Moreau, Managing Director of the hospital group, says, “Organizing all of this is not just a digitalization project, it’s about upgrading the technology, upgrading the process, making it more reliable, and then moving on to proposing it with Philips for other centers, and learning step by step. All innovation requires apprenticeships and an implementation period, and that’s what we are going to do with Philips.”