Image captured by Dr. Adam Glaser of the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics while in the laboratory of Dr. Jonathan Liu, Stanford University

Author: Sidney Ocanagil-Tunstall

This week marked six months since Mariano de Socarraz, CEO of CorePlus began working with ALAFIA’s technology and CEO, Camilo Buscaron. CorePlus, a full service pathology laboratory based in the Carolina, Puerto Rico, utilises AI as a diagnostic, offering pathology and cytopathology services for diagnosing malignant and benign tumours.

The pair first met in New Orleans for USCAP 2023, forming a partnership looking to transform the industry’s ‘best practices’ and to accelerate glass slide to digital pathology migration. While visiting the UK, Camilo invited Pathology News to sit down, chew the fat, and bring us up to speed on his technology’s progress in Puerto Rico.

As Camilo Buscaron put it, “CorePlus is the darling of [the] digital pathology space because they are pioneers… going from not being digital to creating a fully digital operation.” This spirit, as Mariano de Socarraz elaborates, is embedded in their approach: “ALAFIA provides us with a new opportunity to have supercomputing capabilities on-prem. Currently developing our first use case, ALAFIA’s supercomputing technology enables our lab to work with the likes of Alpenglow Biosciences, a scanning technology generating extremely large image files.”

Alpenglow Biosciences has developed a technology that many of us in the industry would refer to as ‘direct to digital’, taking whole tissue straight to the scanner, no glass, less hassle, faster diagnosis. An issue facing the wider adoption of this technology, however, is the significant compute power required to run these algorithms in a practical setting. This is precisely where ALAFIA’s partnership with CorePlus proves transformative. Camilo explains: “Now what we’ve done is helped them on the computational side… CorePlus now has the computational tools to work with this next generation scanning technology to ultimately streamline their diagnostic process.”

Video by Dr. Weisi Xie, currently at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, while in the laboratory of Dr. Jonathan Liu, currently at Stanford University

Breakthrough computational capabilities are particularly impactful for specific use cases, such as prostate cancer diagnosis. With multiple tissue samples often taken from different parts of the prostate, the analytical workload for a single patient sample is substantial. By eliminating the need for glass slides and enabling direct digital processing, CorePlus, with ALAFIA’s power, can reduce the time from sample acquisition to final diagnosis. This efficiency not only lowers costs for health systems and laboratory operations, but more importantly, facilitates quicker patient treatment and recovery.

Notes

We will be covering on-premise supercomputing and alternate cloud solutions in future discussions. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of this project, and learn more about supercomputing in digital pathology, processing multi-gigabyte images watch the full podcast with Camilo Buscaron and Sidney Ocanagil-Tunstall, Marketing Director, Pathology News.