Ibex Medical Analytics, the leader in AI-powered cancer diagnostics, and Medipath, the largest network of private pathology labs in France, today announced a new agreement to expand the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to additional labs in the Medipath network. The deployment includes new AI-powered tools for diagnosing multiple tissue types and will support Medipath pathologists with improved diagnostic accuracy and efficiency.
Medipath, which provides pathology services to more than 250 hospitals and clinics across France, is a network of 115 pathologists and more than 580 employees, spread across 30 sites.
France, as with most European countries, is challenged by an increasing prevalence of cancer and a decline in the number of pathologists. Coupled with rapid advances in personalized medicine over the last several years that have resulted in a growing complexity of cancer diagnosis, these trends have led to increased demand for diagnostic testing and growing workloads imposed on pathology departments. Pathologists play a crucial role in the detection and diagnosis of cancer, with their assessments being vital for reaching correct treatment decisions by oncologists and improving patient survival rates. Clearly, there is a growing need for automated solutions and decision-support tools that help pathologists detect cancer to the utmost accuracy more rapidly.
The Galen™ suite of solutions from Ibex supports pathologists in a variety of tasks during the diagnosis of breast, prostate, and gastric biopsies and helps improve the accuracy of cancer diagnosis, reduce the turnaround time, boost productivity and improve the user experience for pathologists. It is the most widely deployed AI technology in pathology and is used as part of everyday clinical practice at laboratories, hospitals, and health systems worldwide. Galen demonstrated outstanding outcomes across multiple clinical studies performed on various tissue types and diagnostic workflows1,2,3,4,5.
Since 2020, pathologists at Medipath have been using Ibex’s solutions in routine clinical practice, paving the way to overall digitization of their pathology services using Philips’ IntelliSite Pathology Solution which included the deployment of a network of high-throughput digital pathology scanners across 15 sites, connected via the Philips Image Management Solution.
Under the new expansion agreement, Medipath will roll out Ibex’s solutions to all sites in France. Pathologists at Medipath will use the Galen platform for decision support during primary diagnosis of breast, prostate, and gastric biopsies, enabling them to improve diagnostic accuracy and streamline workflows via automated case prioritization, AI-powered cancer detection, reporting, pre-ordering of immunohistochemistry (IHC) and other ancillary tests and other productivity-enhancing tools. This unprecedented scale of AI implementation at the network level has the potential to provide Medipath with economies of scale and efficiency gains, reduced operational costs and improved service levels.
“We are writing a new chapter on our digital transformation journey, and excited to work with our partners at Ibex on this expansion project, making their AI portfolio available to more labs and pathologists in our network,” said Dr. Olivier Vire, Chairman of the Medipath group. “Integrating Ibex as a foundation of primary diagnosis helps our pathologists improve the accuracy of reporting and optimize processes in our labs that ultimately deliver better patient care. We look forward to introducing additional AI tools from Ibex across our network as Medipath remains committed to being the leading AI-enabled healthcare provider in France”.
“Medipath are trailblazers! We’re working closely with their team to roll out an expansive AI-powered digital pathology network,” said Stuart Shand, Chief Commercial Officer at Ibex Medical Analytics. “Ibex is committed to providing every patient with a precise, timely, and personalized cancer diagnosis, made possible with our AI technology that supports real-world needs from physicians.”
