OMNI Expands Digital Pathology Capabilities to Advance Gastrointestinal Diagnostics
At OmniPathology, innovation is not simply about adopting new technology ~ it is about finding practical ways to use technology to improve diagnostic quality, efficiency, and ultimately patient care.
As part of our continuing expansion of digital pathology, OmniPathology has partnered with OptraScan to add the OS-Ultra digital scanner to our portfolio of advanced digital imaging technologies. This new capability addresses an important and particularly challenging application in gastrointestinal (GI) pathology: the digital detection of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori).
A Small Organism with Significant Clinical Importance
OmniPathology evaluates a high volume of gastric biopsies every day. One of the important diagnostic questions in these specimens is whether H. pylori is present.
This small bacterium is associated with chronic gastritis and peptic ulcer disease and is a major risk factor for gastric cancer. Identifying H. pylori accurately and efficiently is therefore an important component of the evaluation of many gastric biopsy specimens.
The challenge is its size. H. pylori organisms are extremely small ~ approximately an order of magnitude smaller than a typical human cell. Detecting these organisms can be difficult with conventional digital pathology imaging systems, particularly when tissue has been routinely stained with Giemsa.
Solving a Digital Pathology Challenge
As pathology laboratories transition from glass slides to digital workflows, the ability to reliably visualize H. pylori has emerged as an important technical challenge.
Traditional workarounds can introduce additional steps into the laboratory workflow, potentially affecting turnaround time, requiring additional staining procedures, or increasing costs. For a high-volume GI pathology laboratory, even seemingly small workflow disruptions can have a meaningful operational impact.
OptraScan has developed an innovative high-resolution imaging solution designed to digitally capture H. pylori organisms in gastric biopsy specimens routinely stained with Giemsa.
For OmniPathology, this represents more than the addition of another scanner. It represents an important step toward creating a more comprehensive digital workflow specifically designed around the realities of GI pathology.
Building a More Complete Digital GI Pathology Workflow
The addition of the OptraScan OS-Ultra, with a capacity of up to 480 slides, expands OmniPathology's ability to digitally image challenging GI specimens while supporting the high-throughput requirements of our laboratory.
By incorporating specialized imaging capabilities into our existing digital pathology environment, Omni continues to move toward a future in which digital pathology is not simply an alternative way to view a glass slide ~ it becomes an integral part of how pathology is performed.
Our goal is to combine advanced imaging, pathology expertise, laboratory science, and innovative technology to create digital workflows that are practical, scalable, and focused on delivering the highest quality diagnostic information to physicians and their patients.
This collaboration with OptraScan is another milestone in OmniPathology's ongoing commitment to advancing digital pathology and bringing the benefits of innovation to the everyday practice of gastrointestinal medicine.
