Aignostics Launches HETA Clinical AI Products for Pan-Cancer Pathology Workflows

Image Credit: Rosemarie Krupar, Head of Pathology, Aignostics

Aignostics today announced the launch of HETA Clinical, a new family of “pan-cancer” AI products covering the pathology workflow from intake to molecular testing to evaluation. The first four HETA Clinical products measure slide quality, tumor presence, mitosis number, and tumor cellularity on whole slide H&E images.

• HETA Quality Control measures slide quality prior to analysis, detecting a range of slide quality issues.
• HETA Tumor Detection annotates tumor regions and flags cases that may contain a tumor during scanning, so that they are read first and additional stains can be ordered upon receipt.
• HETA Mitoses counts mitoses, providing a reproducible mitotic count.
• HETA Tumor Cellularity measures the tumor cell content and proposes a region with sufficient tumor content to be analyzed by molecular tests.

These assessments are usually done with the naked eye, which takes time, and visual estimates naturally vary from reader to reader. Pathologists we interviewed at leading academic medical centers and precision medicine laboratories estimate that 10-20% of molecular tests fail because the tissue does not contain enough tumor tissue, which can lead to repeated biopsies and long delays. HETA Clinical helps laboratories prioritize cases, reduce turnaround times, and confirm that samples contain sufficient tumor tissue prior to molecular testing.

“HETA Clinical provides laboratories with a faster path through their workflow,” said Rosemarie Krupar, M.D., Vice President of Pathology at Aignostics. “Measurements like tumor burden and mitosis count are critical to many pathology specialties and determine much of the work that follows slide examination. Cell-by-cell quantification is the area where AI provides consistency at scale, freeing up time for pathologists to focus on the aspects of the job that require their expertise. »

The four HETA Clinical products are all based on HETA (formerly Atlas H&E-TME), Aignostics’ core pan-cancer platform for spatial H&E tissue analysis. In a recent study, the cell classification by HETA matched or exceeded that of pathology specialists. Because HETA covers a wide range of cancer types, HETA Clinical brings AI to a wide range of pathology subspecialties, not just the most common types of cancer.

Aignostics also recently announced early access to PathoSearch, a visual search engine for pathology cases. Other HETA Clinical products will be commercialized over time and integrated into image management systems, including Techcyte Fusion® AP. Pathologists using Fusion can contact their Techcyte representative for a demonstration.