GE Healthcare and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) recently announced they had been beginning a joint venture in digital pathology. Together, they formed Omnyx, LLC, which would develop and market a system for digital pathology. To date, digital pathology is a market that is only been nibbled at the edges, and is primarily the domain of microscope businesses such as Zeiss, Nikon, and Olympus. Nonetheless, a small number of businesses, bolstered by advances in digital image-gathering, are entering what is predicted to grow to be a to billion market.
Digital Pathology
Just put, digital pathology is the utilization of digital photography to capture images on microscope slides. In the past (the early 1990s), there were a number of technical problems with digital imaging of anatomic pathology samples. Digital cameras captured the microscope slide images and stored them. Even so, the resolution of the digital photographs was not competitive with microscope optics and storage space was limited. A enormous amount of information storage was needed if the images of an whole microscope slide were to be archived. In addition, the job of capturing the whole microscope slide contents was time-consuming and laborious.