Today, Pathcore is introducing technologies that lower implementation costs of digital pathology. Our new hierarchical storage management (HSM) system enables large-scale digitization of pathology slides by reducing the cost of image storage and archival by up to 60%. This innovation is a fully managed and turnkey offering that leverages the latest in cloud technologies to achieve significantly lower operational costs of digital pathology implementations.
The Rising Popularity of Digital Pathology
Digital pathology, the practice of digitizing glass slides for computerized review and analysis, has gained widespread acceptance within the pathology community over the recent decades. Pathologists and laboratories have embraced digital pathology because the technology enables digital remote reads and enables the use of computational AI tools in a discipline that has been analog and manual for over 400 years.
Financial Challenges of Digital Pathology
However, as labs have begun to digitize their workloads, the high costs associated with procuring the necessary whole slide scanning hardware, workflow software and IT infrastructure have been a barrier to full scale digitization and widespread adoption. IT infrastructure costs in particular, which are driven by the costs of storage and archival of digital slides, has been a significant barrier to full scale digitization of pathology workloads.
The IT infrastructure needed to store, maintain, back up and secure these images is costly, given the high data volumes associated with full digitization and the regulatory requirements to retain electronic records for 10-25 years, particularly in GLP regulated pre-clinical studies. Many laboratories need help with electronic data retention mandates because data volumes can exceed petabytes per year if lab workloads are fully digitized. For example, a standard toxicopathology study might generate several thousand slides, translating to hundreds of gigabytes of data that must be retained per regulations; similar data volumes are encountered in multispectral immunofluorescence (mIF) and spatial biology studies.
Introducing Pathcore’s HSM Technology
With the introduction of HSM, Pathcore is continuing to support wide scale digitization of pathology workloads. This innovation is a fully managed and turnkey offering that lowers operational costs of image storage and archival by 60% compared to previous Pathcore rates and 67% relative to market rates.
Technical Insights into HSM
HSM delivers significant cost savings by automatically moving aging data across multiple storage tiers. As aging data moves to less expensive storage tiers, the overall cost of data retention is dramatically reduced. Despite the savings, HSM maintains the high performance you expect from Pathcore solutions and ensures instant availability of data. All of these benefits are achieved with much less than 0.1% (on average) increase in the actual data size, due to metadata that HSM automatically generates for seamless operation.
Impact on Laboratory Operations and Workflows
These savings enable laboratories to nearly triple their digital workflows without increasing IT budgets. As HSM continues to improve and as cloud storage costs continue to decline, we anticipate additional savings that can be strategically used to expand digitization capacity further.
Historically, pathology laboratories have had to contend with the high implementation costs in order to fully digitize their workloads. IT infrastructure costs and in particular the operational costs related to storage and archival of images have been a barrier to the widespread adoption of digital pathology.
Transform Your Lab with Pathcore’s HSM
Leverage Pathcore’s latest innovation to transform your laboratory operations, reduce costs, and enhance your digital pathology capabilities. Are you ready to take the next step? Contact us today to learn more about how Pathcore's HSM can benefit your lab and set up a discovery call with our experts.