Mayo Clinic Launches Digital Pathology Platform

Jan. 13, 2025
Goal is to make diagnoses faster, more accurate, and more efficient and to improve treatment approaches

Mayo Clinic has announced the formation of Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology, designed to unlock the power of its archive of digital slides to accelerate medical breakthroughs.

As Mayo Clinic explains, the vast majority of pathology practices remain tethered to analog processes, hindering access to 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 invested 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.

Mayo Clinic's de-identified clinical data and its Platform architecture, combined with technical expertise and resources of Nvidia, are powering the transformation. To improve performance and scalability of generative AI in pathology, Mayo Clinic also is collaborating with Aignostics, which builds AI models for digital solutions in precision medicine. 

"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, CEO of Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology, in a statement. 

"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," says Viktor Matayas, CEO of Aignostics, in a statement.

In less than two months, Mayo Clinic and Aignostics developed a foundation model built on 1.2 million de-identified slides from Mayo Clinic and Charité – Universitätsmediz in 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 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. 

"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," said Matthew Callstrom, M.D. Ph.D., chair of Mayo Clinic Radiology in the Midwest and medical director for Generative AI and Strategy, in a statement.

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