Philips' IntelliSite Pathology Solution is an automated digital pathology creation, management and viewing system that's made up of an ultra-fast slide scanner, image management system, and software tools. It received FDA clearance in 2013 for a specific breast cancer test called HER2.

A small company making big waves
Philips believes that PathXL’s expertise and product portfolio in educational tools will help drive the adoption of digital pathology. The company is also confident that PathXL's expertise and product portfolio in image analysis software and its workflow tools for research applications will be a solid base for its future image analysis software for diagnostic applications.



PathXL is based in Northern Ireland and was founded in 2004. It's a small company with about 30 employees and has offices in the U.K. and U.S. and distributors across three continents.

Last year PathXL revealed that it was investing £3.6m to drive international sales of its award-winning tumor detection software TissueMark, creating 32 highly-skilled jobs by 2018. “Our ultimate aim is to become world famous for contributing something really meaningful to the field of digital pathology," said the company's CEO, Des Speed, at that time according to the Irish Times.

Path XL has enjoyed its most successful trading year ever in 2015/16, when it revealed a margin growth of 70 percent as a result of being selected by 21 new customers, representing over 6,000 new users of its digital pathology software.

It also reported a large expansion of user licenses across its existing customer base as institutions expand their digital pathology capacity to meet internal demand for imaging and analysis.

Additional investments — and roadblocks — on the road to digital pathology
Philips has also announced a licensing agreement with Visiopharm, a Danish pathology technology company, to offer its breast cancer algorithms through Philips' digital pathology platform. Philips expects that applying advanced computer processing to a digital tumor tissue image will help pathologists achieve a more consistent reading and diagnosis.

“We are committed to empowering pathologists with the best tools to fight cancer,” Russ Granzow, GM of Philips Digital Pathology Solutions, said in a statement accompanying the Visiopharm announcement. “With computational pathology we continue to innovate, with the goal to improve the effectiveness and quality of cancer diagnosis.”

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