June 5th, 2008

In its latest for-profit venture beyond hospitals and insurance, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, partnering with GE Healthcare (a unit of General Electric Co.) is spending $20 million on a “virtual microscope” designed to replace glass slides with digital images and touted as a faster and more accurate way for doctors to identify diseases, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“UPMC and GE are contributing a total of $40 million toward the launch of Omnyx LLC — a company to be based in Pittsburgh and promising to employ 40 within three years (20 have been hired so far). The state is contributing $80,000 in tax credits and a $100,000 grant. Collectively, UPMC and GE are predicting the market for digital renderings of glass slides (those used to diagnose disease) will eventually expand to $2 billion, and that Omnyx can capture 25 percent — or $500 million. UPMC and GE would each share half of any revenues.

Work in this field began about a decade ago and among the early pioneers was Dr. Michael Becich, chair of the department of biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. The first machines were too slow for wide adoption, said Dr. George Michalopoulos, chairman of the pathology department at the University of Pittsburgh and a pathologist at UPMC.

But the GE device, he said, is fast enough to “incorporate into the work flow” of a typical UPMC hospital that works through 1,000 slides per morning.”