Global digital pathology leads to expert diagnosis at IDEXX Laboratories in UK

IDEXX Laboratories has 87 pathologists and 28 scanners, processing 450,000 cases each year across 75 locations across North America, Europe and Australia. Digital transformation is aiding their successful operations across the globe.

Dr. Jenny McKay, European Head of Anatomic Pathology at IDEXX, says, “With digital pathology, we can consult on our cases very, very quickly. Prior to digital pathology we could not do that.” “The team at IDEXX understands that nobody wants to wait for a result or have inconclusive results. The sooner pathologists are able to provide a confident diagnosis, the sooner veterinarians can start treatment."

“At IDEXX, slides from the lab are placed into Philips digital scanners, which operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The digital images are stored on a Philips server, with access that means that the IDEXX team can get a second opinion on a diagnosis within hours, as opposed to two or three days, as was the case before digitization. This also allows for real-time consultation, with the ability to discuss and collaborate on-screen for a particular case if needed.”

“Another advantage of digital pathology is that pathologists are able to work from home, which reduces turnaround time on difficult cases. It is very important to IDEXX to be able to provide accurate diagnosis, with results available as soon as possible for clinicians to be able to quickly determine treatment, especially in the case of severe or life-threatening disease.

IDEXX plans to work with Philips to develop an image repository with a database of interesting cases in order to perform further analytics on the samples and perhaps identify markers of disease in animals that could be applicable to human diseases as well. Digitalization is key to the evolving field of computational pathology.”