Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / How Proscia Accelerates Pathology With AI w/Co-Founder & CEO, David West | HealthBiz Brief

Transcript

How Proscia Accelerates Pathology With AI w/Co-Founder & CEO, David West | HealthBiz Brief · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:00
  Pathology is one of the last branches of medicine to be digitized.
• 0:04
  Now that it's finally happening, can it be combined with AI to help medicine overcome its biggest hurdles in research and personalized care?
• 0:15
  you Welcome to Health Biz Briefs.
• 0:19
  I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with ProSHA co-founder and CEO, David West.
• 0:25
  David, thanks for joining me today.
• 0:27
  Thanks for having me on, David.
• 0:28
  I want to know, you know, what is the value of digital pathology?
• 0:34
  Digital pathology is about taking this glass and microscope based discipline and moving it to an image or digital discipline.
• 0:44
  And these images contain a gigabytes worth of data, about a billion pixels that are telling some story about a patient's cancer or other disease that would otherwise be sitting on a shelf on a piece of glass collecting dust, doing nothing for us.
• 0:59
  I think fundamentally the value of digital pathology is in the value of the data that's being created and that the impact that can have to patient care, both directly in diagnostic settings, making it easy for the right pathologists or pathologists to see that patient's case and in our ability to understand disease on a deeper level in research settings.
• 1:25
  Now you've been a CEO for a while now from a pretty young age.
• 1:29
  What would you say is your biggest challenge that you face as CEO?
• 1:33
  I think culture is super important and it's something that is based on, you know, first principles, um, but you have to really, that you have to really believe in and set from day one, but it also has, it adapts over time to the changes of the company.
• 1:50
  I think for us as a business, as we've grown up and gone from, you know, three people sitting in a smelly basement to a hundred person plus company with folks in Europe and the US.
• 2:03
  Not only are we a bigger team today, but we're also playing in the sort of big leagues of the diagnostics market where we have a patient on the other side of our technology who's really counting on us to have all the right things in place to make sure they're getting high quality.
• 2:23
  diagnosis and that we have high quality products.
• 2:27
  And so balancing the sort of nimbleness and innovation, things that you need in the early stages of a company with the importance of sort of measure twice and cut once mentality that's needed to as you grow and to play in a diagnostic space is a tough needle thread.
• 2:52
  You're dealing with a lot of advanced technologies at Procia, and I'm wondering how AI and digital pathology intersect, and especially in a way that could help the patient.
• 3:03
  Digital pathology is the foundation for AI.
• 3:07
  In order to use AI applications, you've got to be on an image, you've got to be dealing with data rather than a physical medium, including the microscope.
• 3:19
  And once you're digital, it opens up.
• 3:21
  all of these new opportunities, both in that it creates lots of data upon which your software people can train and develop algorithms.
• 3:30
  And it's the foundation, the workflow into which you're deploying these algorithms.
• 3:38
  Well, David West, CEO of Procia has been my guest today on Health Biz Briefs.
• 3:42
  If you like what you heard, please check out my Health Biz podcast for a full length interview with David about his life and career.
• 3:49
  David, thanks so much for joining me today.
• 3:52
  Thank you, David.