Mayo Clinic partners to lead digital pathology

ROCHESTER, Minn. – The Mayo Clinic has announced the formation of Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology, designed on a platform architecture to unlock the power of its extensive archive of digital slides to revolutionize pathology and accelerate medical breakthroughs.

Mayo Clinic’s expertise, de-identified clinical data, and its Platform architecture, combined with technical expertise and resources of NVIDIA, a world leader in accelerated computing, is powering the ability to accelerate this transformation.

In addition, to improve performance and scalability of generative AI in pathology, Mayo Clinic is collaborating with Aignostics, an industry leader in building artificial intelligence (AI) models for digital solutions in precision medicine in a way that mirrors its established approach to patient care.

This collaborative, multidisciplinary effort leverages both medical and technological strengths, and the early achievements are promising.

“Mayo Clinic is reimagining what is possible in disease detection and prediction, both within its own system and globally. We are doing this by using large, diverse datasets to build powerful artificial intelligence models in pathology. This will make diagnoses faster, more accurate, and more efficient, improving treatment approaches and speeding new cures to patients,” said Jim Rogers (pictured), CEO, Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology.

“AI-driven insights can accelerate diagnostics, enhance precision medicine and revolutionize patient care,” said Kimberly Powell, VP of healthcare and life sciences, NVIDIA. “By digitizing and harnessing the power of vast datasets through its Digital Pathology platform, powered by NVIDIA’s accelerated computing, Mayo Clinic is helping pave the way for a future with faster medical breakthroughs, better treatments and improved outcomes for patients across the globe.”

“Merging Mayo Clinic’s data and expertise with our advanced machine learning capabilities will produce breakthrough foundation models and AI products that advance the field of precision medicine and meaningfully improve patient care,” said Viktor Matayas, CEO of Aignostics.

The majority of pathology practices remain tethered to analog processes, hindering access to critical diagnostic data that could be used to expand diagnostics and treatments and speed the development of new therapies to benefit patients.

To address this challenge, Mayo Clinic has moved quickly, investing in digitizing its pathology practice and by scanning its extensive archive of pathology slides, as well as prospectively scanning pathology slides from current patients.

To date, Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology has leveraged 20 million digital slide images linked to 10 million patient records that incorporate treatments, medications, imaging, clinical notes, genomic data and more.

In less than two months, Mayo Clinic and Aignostics developed a leading foundation model built on 1.2 million deidentified slides from Mayo Clinic and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, findings of which were published in a paper on Jan. 9.

Current efforts include developing and deploying new solutions enabled by this model. Future plans are focused on building new models, including one being trained on 5 million slides.

The NVIDIA collaboration will create a first-in-class infrastructure for building and deploying foundation models to accelerate generative AI advances in pathology and beyond. With NVIDIA’s healthcare-specific full stack computing architecture for artificial intelligence, NVIDIA Clara, Mayo Clinic is building models that will open new frontiers in medicine and lay the foundation for more personalized patient experiences, the organization said.

The development of Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology has been a planned process over many years. The pathology platform takes advantage of the portfolios of Mayo Clinic Platform, a global network that drives digital innovation around diagnosis, treatment and operational improvements worldwide, and Mayo Clinic Laboratories, which provides advanced testing and pathology services for healthcare organizations worldwide.

Continuing its efforts to transform healthcare, Mayo Clinic is working with investors and data providers to continue building a pathology platform that spurs innovation and transforms the medical practice for the benefit of healthcare systems and patients worldwide.

“These new capabilities using digital pathology data will unlock this critically important clinical information for building AI solutions for advanced diagnosis and care of patients and that will improve the lives of patients globally,” says Matthew Callstrom, M.D. Ph.D., chair of Mayo Clinic Radiology in the Midwest and medical director for Generative AI and Strategy.

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