Corporate Partners to Develop Solutions for Storage of High Resolution Pathology Imagery

A corporate partnership has been formed to develop cost-effective, flexible, and secure storage solutions for pathology laboratories that increasingly depend on high-resolution digital imagery.

Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. (Tucson, AZ, USA) a member of the Roche Group (Basel, Switzerland), which innovates and manufactures instruments and reagents to automate tissue processing and slide staining for cancer diagnostics, recently announced that it has entered into an agreement with the data storage and IT infrastructure industry leader EMC Corporation (Hopkinton, MA, USA). The objective is to develop and offer highly scalable and flexible solutions to store and archive medical images as part of the Ventana digital pathology solution for anatomical pathology labs.

Pathology laboratories increasingly rely on digital images scanned from patient slides, and these images must be of the highest possible resolution. The Ventana iScan family of slide scanners offers enhanced image resolution and throughput, which in turn requires significant increases in system storage capacity. To develop the means to store these images, Ventana turned to IT industry leader EMC in order to develop easy to manage, high-capacity storage solutions for its digital pathology.

"This agreement represents the combination of best-in-class technologies and expertise from two industry leaders, further increasing the value we can provide to customers," said Dr. Steve Burnell, digital pathology and workflow lifecycle leader at Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. "EMC's sophisticated analysis of our customers' storage needs, their reputation for quality, and continuous innovation, plus their global service capabilities mean that pathology labs all over the world can focus on analyzing patient slides, not managing storage capacity and archiving."

"By embedding EMC's industry-leading VNX unified storage and information management products within the Ventana Virtuoso software, Ventana, as part of the Roche family of healthcare solutions, is providing their customers with a more advanced, scalable and integrated digital imaging solution. We are pleased to be working so closely with a leading research-focused healthcare company in an effort to help lab technicians and doctors around the world gain access to the most innovative technology to more effectively analyze human tissue as a means of diagnosing and treating life-threatening disease," said Tony Wood, general manager, OEM solutions at EMC Corporation.

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Ventana Medical Systems, Inc.
Roche Group