Definiens Announces Release of Quantitative Digital Pathology and Biomarker Research Portfolio

Definiens, a leading Health Image Intelligence™ company, has announced the release of its new Quantitative Digital Pathology portfolio. The new portfolio has been designed with biomarker development specifically in mind and includes updated versions of Definiens Tissue Studio®, Definiens Developer XD™ as well as the introduction of a novel component, Definiens Image Miner™.

The technology in Definiens’ recently released product suite will provide high accuracy in automatically identifying relevant structures of interest and specific morphology in histology, resulting in a detailed phenotypic fingerprint and biomarker expression profile on a cell-by-cell basis. The large set of descriptors can be correlated against therapy response or patient outcome with the goal of identifying new types of biomarkers of predictive or prognostic value.

Definiens Image Miner™ 1, the novel technology component in this product portfolio, closely integrates data mining with image analysis to accelerate biomarker research. The data mining functionality is based on the same revolutionary Cognition Network Technology used in Definiens’ well-established image analysis solutions. Definiens Image Miner™ 1 provides a substantial productivity increase when profiling tissue probes for clinically or diagnostically relevant differences in morphology or biomarker expression. Development and quality control are supported by seamless links between data points and the visual inspections of associated regions in the tissue.

“We expect the tight integration of our new data-mining engine with the significantly updated image analysis solutions to substantially increase productivity and assay quality in tissue-based biomarker development,” says Dr. Martin Baatz, Vice President of Marketing at Definiens. “We consider this a major step on the way to turning pathology into a quantitative discipline.”

Also included in the new portfolio is Definiens Developer XD™ 2, the most powerful development environment for automated image analysis that addresses a wide scope of functions in biomedical image analysis with unprecedented depth and accuracy. Developer XD™ 2 will be the solution of choice for highly advanced or customized analysis tasks of digital tissue slides. This updated version addresses a series of requirements suggested by the user community including very large data processing and machine learning functionality.

The highly popular product of the suite is Definiens Tissue Studio® 3, which is an updated version of the company’s leading Image Analysis Solution for Quantitative Digital Pathology. It combines highly detailed quantification of tissue specimen with a straightforward and fast out-of-the-box configuration workflow. New features include an improved detection of regions of interest, classification of nuclear morphology and an angiogenesis module.

After exploring the new Definiens Tissue Studio® 3 during the early access program, Mark Lloyd, Supervisor of Analytical Microscopy Core Facility at Moffitt Cancer Center, says: “I can be difficult to please regarding image analysis of histological samples, but this is the best commercial product I have used to date. This includes workflow and usability, as well as function and flexibility.” And Dr. Tom Nifong, VP CLIA Services at Metamark Genetics, adds: “The Composer Technology for automatic detection of regions of interest performed great. It was able to identify tumor, stroma and artifacts in my fluorescence samples. I was really impressed by the improvement in accuracy and speed of the nucleus detection. Fantastic job!”