Microsoft collaborates with digital health company Paige to improve cancer diagnosis and patient care through the use of pathological AI, the companies announced Wednesday.
Based in New York PaigeThe mission of is to transform cancer diagnostics through AI and tissue pathology. It works with health systems, hospitals and laboratories to digitize pathology and workflow, and use AI to help pathologists diagnose cancer faster. It has two FDA approvals: the Paige platform, which allows pathologists to make a diagnosis on a digital slide, and Paige Prostate Detect, an AI app for detecting cancer in prostate samples.
Through the partnership, Microsoft will make a strategic investment in Paige to help them build AI diagnostics, although the amount is still being negotiated, said Andy Moye, Paige’s chief executive. Page will use Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform, as its cloud provider for the Page platform. Through the Paige platform, pathologists can take a tissue sample from a patient, place it on a glass slide, and then place it in a scanner (compared to a microscope), which will then create a digital image of the sample to aid in diagnosis. The data that comes from that slide will then be stored in Azure and customers can choose how long they want it to stay there.
“In Microsoft, we really found a partner that shares our vision of how healthcare is going to be transformed…For us, the vision that we talked about with Microsoft is how do we help create the digitalization of pathology? How do we ensure that these tools are used for better patient care, for better patient outcomes?” Moye said in an interview.
Paige will also be a partner solution in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which will help Paige reach more hospital and health system customers.
In addition, Page will have the opportunity to collaborate with Nuance, a Microsoft company, to integrate with the Nuance Precision Imaging Network. Finally, Page will work with Microsoft Research to create large-scale machine learning models for oncology and pathology.
Moy said that by partnering with Microsoft, Page hopes to reach more hospitals and health systems, and ultimately more patients.
“At the end of the day, for us, we measure most of our success by how many patient lives we’ve impacted,” he said. “As an example of this, with our AI applications, over 3,000 patients have been, in at least some shape or form, impacted by the use of our AI over the past few years. We’d love to see that number be in the tens of thousands in the next year or so.”
Other digital pathology AI companies include Ibex and Indica Labs.
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