Region Skåne selects LABVANTAGE for digitizing histopathological workflows

Region Skåne, has selected LABVANTAGE to deliver a $4 million turn-key solution for digitizing the histopathological workflows of the whole region. The system will possibly be the largest such installation in the world and among the first in northern Europe.

"It is really exciting for me to get to lead the Pathology department into a completely new, digital era, which should provide us with improvements both for quality and patient safety by better utilizing the competencies of all of our pathologists in the whole region," comments Lena Luts, Division Chief for Clinical Pathology.

The digitizing will ease the distribution of slides for pathologists' viewing and will also solve the need for storage. Swedish law requires that all slides be kept for a minimum of 20 years and today this requires a lot of storage. It is also difficult to retrieve a particular case from the archive. In digitized format, the annual production of about 400,000 glass slides will consume 300 terabytes of storage each year. Region Skåne believes that having the slides in digital format not only makes them more accessible but will also reduce cost over time. Digitizing such a large volume of slides and analyzing them electronically will make this installation one of the largest of its kind in the world.

A key component of the delivery is a workflow management system, which will manage the entire laboratory process. An adapted version of Software Point's C5 LIMS will manage all workflows. It will maintain the real-time status of each case and ease the work of technicians and pathologists with integration to laboratory equipment, datamatrix labeling and speech recognition for pathologists.