SpIntellx and CellNetix Pathology & Laboratories said today they will partner to validate the SpIntellx HistoMapr-Breast™ Platform, designed to help healthcare providers diagnose and treat breast cancer more efficiently and accurately by applying “explainable” artificial intelligence (xAI) designed to explain decisions and actions to users.

The collaboration—whose value was not disclosed—is designed to combine the computational power of unbiased spatial analytics and xAI offered by SpIntellx toward proprietary software products and services for analyzing pathology tissue sections with CellNetix’ subspecialty clinical and anatomic pathology services in the Pacific Northwest.

“We will be working closely with CellNetix Pathology & Laboratories to complete the validation of HistoMapr-Breast as the final step in our commercialization process,” stated SpIntellx co-founder and CEO, S. Chakra Chennubhotla, Ph.D. “We are delighted to be partnering with the experts at CellNetix in the next step toward revolutionizing the impact of pathology on precision medicine.”

The companies said they aim to bring a proprietary spatial analytics approach to digital pathology, by generating maximally predictive information from patients’ tissue sections to inform therapeutic strategies and clinical decisions—then convey the automated recommendations to pathologists and other software clearly, using data.

As a result, according to SpIntellx and CellNetix, HistoMapr can build trust and transparency between pathology disease experts and computational pathology systems better than can be done through more traditional black-box AI approaches to digital pathology, such as deep learning.

The HistoMapr technology and approach is designed to be generalizable to a wide range of diseases, both tumor and non-tumor in nature. HistoMapr-Breast is the first of many planned spatial analytics and xAI pathologist guides by the companies designed to:

  • Triage the case workload, with the aim of directing the most difficult and borderline cases to subspecialists;
  • Perform retroactive quality assurance intended to improve pathologists’ accuracy and efficiency and reduce intra- and inter-pathologist discordance;
  • Provide xAI guidance designed to explain why its algorithms made a specific recommendation; and
  • Facilitate standardized reporting in real time.

The platform is the first in the companies’ larger efforts to leverage xAI-assisted lab processes in the development of diagnostics, prognostics, therapeutic strategies, and drug development for tumor and non-tumor diseases, SpIntellx and CellNetix said.

Privately-held CellNetix has more than 60 board-certified pathologists serving hospitals and clinics throughout the Pacific Northwest for more than 50 years. CellNetix more than 25 subspecialties and a dedicated team of 300 technicians and professionals,

“We are thrilled to be working with SpIntellx in further developing and validating HistoMapr and the use of xAI in the practice of pathology,” added Dominique Coco, MD, lead project pathologist with CellNetix. “We see great potential in xAI which could rapidly reshape how we practice pathology.”

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