Pramana, an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled health tech company in Massachusetts, US, has entered a multi-year partnership with Utah-based healthcare network Intermountain Health to develop digital archives for anatomic pathology.

The collaboration will see Pramana, a provider of a digital pathology as a service (DPaaS) solution, leverage advanced AI technology to digitise eight million archival clinical pathology slides from Intermountain Health’s biorepository.

Pramana will employ its Spectral family of scanners and Intelligent Acquisition software for converting the glass slides into digital format.

Pramana chief product officer Prasanth Perugupalli said: “By digitising glass slides, we are helping build massive and varied datasets that can be used by researchers to pave the way toward data-driven decision-making and advanced workflow methods to simplify the daily tasks of pathologists.

“Our collaboration with Intermountain Health further strengthens Pramana’s DPaaS solution. Our solution mitigates most of the manual handling and preparation of the slides, which is otherwise a deterrent for biorepositories that need to justify the costs of digitisation and storage. We are proud to enable Intermountain Health’s biorepository to achieve its goal for digital pathology.”

In addition, the collaboration includes a custom solution involving robotic handling, label de-identification, autonomous scanning, and in-line quality assurance to make the digitisation process efficient.

By deploying SpectralHT scanners and image acquisition and management software, Pramana plans to achieve daily digitisation capacity at the facility of Intermountain Biorepository, which has a network of 33 hospitals and more than 3,900 employed physicians.

This move is expected to provide Intermountain Health with quality and consistent digital images to enhance the effectiveness of clinical research and simplify operational workflows.