Digital Pathology Workflow Solutions
Digital pathology adoption is expanding rapidly; however, most health systems face workflow challenges, including proprietary slide formats, siloed workflows, limited LIS/EHR integration, and difficulties in scaling and integrating whole-slide imaging across the imaging ecosystem. Pathology images are extremely large, often ten times the size of mammography studies, which makes ingestion, routing, and storage onerous to accommodate within existing IT infrastructures.
The Unifier® Enterprise Imaging Platform addresses these digital pathology workflow challenges directly by converting proprietary formats, enriching metadata with clinical context, and integrating seamlessly with LIS, PACS, VNAs, and AI solutions.
Benefits of the Unifier Platform for Digital Pathology Workflows
- Seamless Ingestion: Directly ingests iSyntax, NDPI, SVS, and TIFF, eliminating manual file conversions and reducing ingestion delays.
- Standards-Based Conversion: Converts proprietary slide formats into DICOM Supplement 145-compliant Whole Slide Images (WSI), ensuring interoperability across PACS, LIS, and VNAs.
- Metadata Enrichment: Completes missing or incomplete fields from barcodes by adding LIS/EHR data (e.g., Epic Beaker), thereby improving indexing accuracy and enhancing clinical context.
- Real-Time Access: Generates HL7 Instance Availability Notifications (IANs) at the slide level, enabling immediate visibility in downstream systems.
- Vendor-Neutral Scalability: Operates independently of scanner and PACS vendors, allowing health systems to scale digital pathology without being locked into proprietary ecosystems. Dicom Systems has delivered successful deployments alongside PACS platforms such as Sectra and Infinitt, as well as leading slide scanner vendors including Leica Biosystems, Hamamatsu, and Pramana.
- AI Workflow Enablement: Supports containerized (Docker-based) microservices to initiate AI analysis of pathology images consistently.
Digital Pathology Workflows Expertise
Dicom Systems has proven expertise in streamlining digital pathology workflows for leading healthcare organizations, including:
- Stanford Health Care uses the Unifier platform to power its AI-driven digital pathology infrastructure. By standardizing slide formats, enriching metadata, and enabling movement of pathology images across PACS, LIS, and AI systems, Stanford accelerates diagnostic workflows and research.
- Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) selected Dicom Systems to route extremely large pathology image files across its enterprise. Unifier resolved latency issues and ensured fast, reliable access to diagnostic slides at scale.
- Moffitt Cancer Center deployed Dicom Systems to support scalable digital pathology workflows as part of its enterprise imaging strategy. By enabling standardized DICOM conversion, high-throughput routing of whole slide images, and integration with downstream systems, Unifier supports efficient access to pathology data across clinical and research environments.
Scaling Digital Pathology with Dicom Systems
Dicom Systems partnered with Pure Storage to benchmark the performance of the Unifier® Enterprise Imaging Platform in managing digitized pathology slides. The testing focused on routing throughput, ingestion speed, and latency, using an industry average whole-slide image (WSI) size of 1.3 GB as the baseline.
Pathology images can vary significantly in size. A radical prostatectomy at 20x magnification may reach 30 GB uncompressed, while at 40x magnification, the file size can approach 100 GB. These extremes highlight the importance of scalable infrastructure for digital pathology.
Key Results:
- Routing Performance: Unifier demonstrated the ability to route approximately 85,735 slides per day, equivalent to the output of 29 high-capacity 3DHistech Pannoramic® 1000 scanners operating continuously.*
- Ingestion Performance: The platform ingested approximately 36,953 slides per day, more than 13 times the annual workload of a large pathology organization.**
* Based on 3DHistech’s Pannoramic® 1000 specifications of 30 seconds per slide, or ~2,880 slides per day per scanner if running 24/7.
** According to Journal of Pathology Informatics, large pathology centers may produce over 1 million digital slides annually (~1 PB of uncompressed data), or about 2,739 slides per day.
Download the Whitepaper for a full performance analysis and methodology.
Take the Next Step in Digital Pathology
Do not let proprietary formats or system silos restrict your digital pathology adoption strategy. Learn how the Unifier platform can standardize, scale, and accelerate digital pathology workflows across your enterprise.