Digital Pathology Imaging – The next frontier in Medical Imaging

Bikash Sabata

Senior Director, Imaging & Software – Digital Pathology

 Ventana Medical Systems, Inc.

Location: 3105 Engineering Building

Time: 11:00am 

Pathologists have practiced medicine relatively unchanged over the last century to render diagnosis of disease. However, over the last decade, the practice of Pathology is undergoing a foundational change. In addition to the revolutions in diagnostic biomarkers, we are seeing a ground-swell in new imaging technologies. This new image based technology offers significant opportunities to the practice. However, it comes at a cost – there are technology, regulatory, and methodological challenges which may derail the adoption process if not addressed proactively and innovatively.

Pathology lags behind other medicine practice such as Radiology in the adoption of digital workflow. Recently, significant advances have been made in the capture and management of the whole slide images used in pathology practice and this is leading to an explosion in the data volume that completely eclipses the vast quantities of data being produced in Radiology. Another area of technology challenges is related to the analysis of the imagery data for detection, identification, recognition and quantification of the pathology in the slide. This clearly is the bleeding edge of digital pathology which will enable the creation of a paradigm shift in the practice of medicine.

This talk will focus on the technological challenges and briefly touch on the other areas. We will look at the different image capture technologies to the image analysis techniques. We will present the key computational challenges associated with this new image modality and computer-assisted image analysis to fully realize the potential of digital pathology in medical discovery and patient care.

Bikash Sabata is the Senior Director for Imaging and Software, Digital Pathology at Roche Tissue Diagnostics (Ventana Medical Systems). He has a strong combination of technology research in academic settings and product development in startups that encompass over 20 years of experience in developing imaging and computer vision architecture and algorithms. He was the Chief Technology Officer at BioImagene that was acquired by Ventana/Roche. Before BioImagene, he was the Co-founder and CTO of Aginova Inc, cofounder of Primitive Root, principal scientist at Peakstone Inc. and a scientist at SRI International. Bikash was also an assistant professor at Wayne State University, Detroit. He holds a Masters and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.