Proscia has launched DermAI, the first in its series of AI applications that advance the practice of pathology. A module on Proscia’s Concentriq platform, DermAI leverages deep learning to pre-screen and classify skin biopsies to help reduce costly errors and improve laboratory quality and efficiency as the number of medical professionals entering the field of pathology continues to decline.
The standard of care for diagnosing the 25 million skin biopsies taken in the USA every year has been based on a pathologist’s interpretation of patterns in tissue using a microscope. This 150-year-old manual and subjective practice cannot keep pace with the increasing demand for pathology diagnosis or deliver critical data in the promise of precision treatment. DermAI uses deep learning to read and automatically classify hundreds of variants of skin diseases into pre-diagnostic categories to improve the confidence, quality, and speed of pathology.
“DermAI demonstrates a high level of accuracy in categorising common diagnoses,” said Dr. Kiran Motaparthi, from the Department of Dermatology at University of Florida College of Medicine. “As a dermatopathologist who seeks to prioritise and focus time on challenging cases, this is exciting technology.”
Proscia trained and tested the DermAI algorithm using patient biopsies from leading academic and commercial derm laboratories including Cockerell Dermatopathology, Dermatopathology Laboratory of Central States, University of Florida, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. This multi-site study successfully validated the performance of DermAI using over 20,000 patient biopsy slides. Proscia intends to submit DermAI to the FDA for review to use in clinical diagnosis.
“To date, attempts to apply AI to pathology have been engineered in isolated development environments using toy datasets. The challenge in fulfilling the promise of deep learning in diagnostic medicine is bringing to market a solution that can perform in the real world where we face tremendous variability among labs, systems, and specimen. Proscia is the first to deliver on this promise,” explained David West, CEO of Proscia.
