163: Digital Diagnostics Summit 2025 Innovation in Action - Conference Update

What if climbing the digital pathology “mountain” isn’t about reaching the summit alone—but knowing where base camp is, and who you bring with you?

In this episode, I take you inside the Digital Diagnostic Summit in Park City, hosted by Lumea, where fewer than 100 digital pathology leaders gathered to share their journeys, challenges, and solutions. 

From resilient metaphors of Everest climbs to practical strategies for workflow ownership, clinical trials, and AI-powered biomarkers, this summit showed that the future of diagnostics is built on collaboration, purpose-driven adoption, and trust in data custodianship.

🔑 Highlights with Timestamps

• [00:03–01:49] Summit kickoff – “Climbing the Digital Pathology Mountain” theme and why this summit feels different.
• [01:49–03:38] Everest keynote – lessons in resilience and why failure is part of innovation.
• [03:38–06:02] Collaboration over competition – why base camp is as important as the summit.
• [06:02–09:18] Workflow ownership – defining value-driven outcomes before choosing tools.
• [09:18–11:35] Data custodianship – protecting patient privacy while enabling ethical research.
• [11:35–15:16] Panel insights – choosing digital tools that integrate into workflows and prevent burnout.
• [15:16–17:31] Horseback networking – why informal conversations matter as much as panels.
• [17:31–19:18] Emerging health tech – 3D printing prosthetics and synthetic blood innovations.
• [19:18–23:54] Personalized biomarkers – outcome-driven diagnostics that move beyond human scoring.
• [23:54–29:16] Digital pathology in trials – Aperture platform launch and patient stratification in global studies.
• [29:16–31:42] Community impact – stories of career transformation and remote adoption.
• [31:42–32:37] Closing thoughts – why intimate summits accelerate adoption and what’s next.

📚 Resources from this Episode

• FDA Journal of Pathology & Informatics – Research on data custodianship and ethical use.
• Proscia Aperture Platform – New tool for clinical trial management and patient identification.
• Astro Zenica Digital Biomarker – Personalized biomarker validated by outcomes.
• Barco Healthcare White Paper – Why display quality matters in pathology.

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✨ Key Insights from the Summit

✔ Success in digital pathology is not about scaling alone—partnerships matter.
✔ Labs must own their workflows and define outcomes before adopting tools.
✔ Data custodianship is central for protecting privacy while advancing research.
✔ Personalized biomarkers are shifting diagnostics toward outcome-driven AI.
✔ Clinical trials benefit from digital pathology in patient selection and stratification.
✔ Intimate summits provide mentorship, collaboration, and career transformation.
✔ Exciting health tech—from synthetic blood to 3D printing—complements digital pathology innovation.

Transcript

00:00:03

Welcome my digital pathology trailblazers. We are reporting live from the digital diagnostic summit and I'm here with a special guest Imogen Fitt from Signify Research. Yes, we have several cameras so just bear with me. And I see people joining. You are amazing. Leave me something in the chat. Let me know. give me some give us some um hi in the chat what time it is and where you're tuning in from. I have I'm just going to show you. I have this other camera that we're trying to set up

00:00:36

so that we have good footage for everything for the podcast. But uh we are in Park City. I have to also look at the right camera. So, h the before we go to the fun stuff that we did, uh, and I'm not going to reveal yet what it is, uh, because we did a super cool excursion and maybe you've seen on LinkedIn, so it's not a mystery. H, let's talk about the like the through line and topic of the summit. So, the summit is organized by Lumea. Uh, Lumea is a digital pathology company, a software company that enables labs to go

00:01:15

digital. Not only software, they have hardware as well. Yeah, please. I'm gonna get some comments from Lumea people that I don't know exactly what they're doing, but I know what they're doing. But h the important thing is that this summit is uh the theme is climbing the digital pathology mountain and uh who is coming here? It's a little bit different because it's a conference, but it's actually a retreat. Um, and it's small. Like, how many people do we have? Less than 100. I'm gonna

00:01:49

Sorry, less than 100. Definitely a little bit. It's more um it's more intimate than other events. Yeah, less than 100 people. And it's those I would say those who are pretty high on the digital pathology mountain or who are already like waving at us from the top and trying to help us um and basically guide us and that was the um the through line of the event. Um did you attend the key keynote from the Everest? Yes. Everest climber and you say so I had to leave um for a short bit and

00:02:28

I came back in and the fiber of the group was different like everybody was moment I know I but honestly like just watching everybody else's reactions they were just astounded by this this story and how this guy had not I summit summited Mount Everest twice not once um and as he was talking and comparing that to resilience and kind of themes that you need and you're a pioneer in innovation. Yeah, I knew that the rest of the audience had massively enjoyed enjoy the talk. So, it was amazing. So, uh basically the

00:03:04

story was long story short was that we had a person who actually climbed Mount Everest, right? And uh he uh didn't achieve it in the first attempt and that was kind of one of the messages. And let me just say hi to everybody who's saying something in the comments. Okay, we have people from San Jose, California. So, it's not that late for you guys. It's the same hour six. Yeah, six. Okay, whoever is joining, let me know. So, uh he climbed a Mount Everest, didn't do it in the first attempt, h

00:03:38

needed help and succeeded in the second attempt. And obviously there was a lot of lessons learned but uh one of the lessons is you may not succeed in the first attempt right? Yeah. Uh and if you really want to do it then you're going to do it and you're going to find people who help you. And when um I have some notes from Lumeatin and also my notes. So did you attend Orley's uh talk? Yeah that was really good. I think she um I think she got notified that she'd be doing it the the evening before. So

00:04:17

Oh, well good. Well done. She kind of shared the story from MSK and some lessons that she had learned and some of the takeaways that I think the rest of us were kind of familiar with but needed to hear again and again because it's important to um really drill down and and not forget and about the real foundation that under digital mythology rather than moving on and saying oh something new something exciting those sorts of things. There's always nothing to learn and we're going to get to like new,

00:04:51

exciting, useful and useless about your panel because I was leading a panel. But so one of the things that she said that um stayed with me was um maybe you don't need to make it to the top on your own. Maybe you can just make it to the base camp and then find partners who are going to like I don't know carry the torches. Maybe not the good metaphor because there's not enough oxygen to carry any torches but basically to continue the uh the digital pathology journey. um and and you're still successful

00:05:29

because what it is, it's about uh gains for the providers and gains for the patients, right? So, if you can achieve that by partnering, it's even better, right? You don't have to do it all alone. Um I mean that was one of the topics that was picked up in the um the executive round table before the conference began was that labs and vendors are not going to be good at everything and what's important really to drive the industry forward is that collaboration between both pathologists

00:06:02

and the vendors but also as part of the healthare systems that you're in as well. So radiology is a big thing that's come into it. Um but there's wider diagnostics. Hi. Hello. We have Lumeat team. Come, come and wave. We're streaming from your summit. I have my bag. I have everything. And we're live. Latin saying hi from this beautiful Reggie's Reggie's hotel. [Music] That's so cool that you guys joined. So yeah, team is welcoming us. And I see also uh greetings to Otawa in Canada.

00:06:42

Fantastic. So um yeah, vendors and labs collaboration. So one thing um that was also important that was said by Wes. What's Wes's last name? Do we know Wesley? Wesley is the first name, but do we know his last name? We're gonna Google him in the meantime or put them put him in the chat. But basically he do you remember his last name? Yeah. So he says that you need to own and know your work workflow in and out because vendors are going to collaborate. Vendors have like a piece of your solution but they don't know

00:07:26

what you need. You know what you need. So you need to communicate that well and also pick the tools that are going to help you. H and another comment from Dr. Kapor was uh that he was funny because uh like when you ask people uh why would you climb the Everest and one of the like I don't know I've heard this response I don't know if it's a quote or something because it's there and he said like what a stupid reason to do something like why would you would you do digital pathology just

00:08:02

because you can no you there are so many different reasons as well so exactly Right. But because you can is none of them um when it comes to digital pathology. So uh like evaluate where you are like start with the basic like what Orley said and h like see can you maybe partner do you need it at this moment which part of this solution do you need? And when you know that you need it because it's going to make the life of the providers and the life of the patients better. Um then go embark on this journey and find

00:08:44

everything you need the right equipment. Burnham that was his last name. Wes Wesley Burnham. Wesley Birham. Yeah. Burn German. Okay. Burnhard. Um yeah, but one of his um and or his key takeaways was that the the journey to go digital is kind of individual practices and you have to start out by figuring out the list of setting what is the key outcomes that I in my institution want for this because if you don't have that at the forefront of your mind first then it becomes very difficult to decide

00:09:18

later as well. super important keyword uh the outcomes because I think especially when you're at the beginning of the journey you look like for for a blueprint like what are the steps to take and it's rather okay what are the outcomes that I want to achieve and then um like working backwards right yeah and we talked a bit about um like value and what does the actual value from digital quality mean to you is it things like improved efficient they were talking about like improved efficiency

00:09:50

contributing to research meaningfully like actually improving patient outcomes. Um you know there were small topics like um data monetization the just offsetting digital quality costs is quite additive. um it meant something very different to everybody. And I think I think the underlying sort of theme as well was that the stakeholders that I talked to were very serious about their role as sort of custodians of of that data and that if they're going to go digital and they should really be able to make use of it

00:10:24

to its fullest and make sure that they track things like patient outcomes like that improvement religious workflow and things like that. Yeah, I like the word custodian. And that ties into um kind of Lum's heritage because one of the founder was Dr. Matt Levit and he's now the founder of the digital diagnostics foundation. And their mission is to basically be the honest broker, be the custodian, be the uh the guardian of the data that uh on one hand protects the patients and makes sure that that everything is covered on

00:11:01

that and on the other side makes it possible for institutions to do um ethical transparent research with the data that they have. they also have like different uh sources of the data. So it's not just like one populations they have different demographics also very uh a lot of under represented uh demographics in the data especially in the uh time of personalized medicine like it's not going to be one algorithm fits all yeah but before we talk about the fun stuff we did and all the discussions

00:11:35

that we had there h let's talk about your panel what did you lead what was the topic of the panel who were your guests and what were the takeaways so um I led did a um the panel was essentially talking about the essential components of the digital technology toolkit, what you need to go digital and what's kind of like the the the fat and the trimmings and stuff. So do without I like they use this word um dead weight. Dead weight dead weight. Yeah, dead weight was something we we discussed um quite quite

00:12:07

quite thoroughly. So I think we had Andy, we had um Giovani, you know, a few P stakeholders, Greg as well. So an Giovani, do I have to introduce them? I just Yeah, let's let's let's say their first and last name because we kind of meet them at every conference. You're going to see them at every conference. Uh and sometimes I forget their last name. Giovanni Luhan. I remember his last name. Gregory Osmond. Um and Adam Paul. I'm terrible with last names. Um so Gregory had founded um

00:12:39

previously clinical pathology watch which really got quite much by the way and also we're a guest on the digital pathology podcast and Dr. Adam Cole was a guest on the digital pathology podcast and so was Joan. So if you want to know who these people are listen to the podcast as well go check them out and and so what we kind of discussed we were like what what were your favorite tools going digital? What was it that really spun the needle in terms of making your life easier? what was something that you

00:13:06

maybe wasted money on and you didn't really like. Um, and I think some of the key themes that came about was it's not necessarily always about a single tool. It's about how that tool is actually embedded into the workflow and the impact it has on the workflow. um because it can do amazing things, but at the end of the day, if it sort of replicates what you just can do in three seconds, then it's it's worth. Um or if it's a really useful tool, but you have to open 10 popup window every time

00:13:35

you want to use it or you want to change that modify the results. Again, it just adds to the work. Nobody wants the HR user burnout replicated in digital. Yeah. Um, I mean we talked I did probe a little bit further and I was you know come on now let's have some specific Yeah. Did you ask them any tough questions? So we avoided what did you waste money on? Well, so we avoided um specific vendor like specific vendors, but things that got me were QA QA tools. Um and I think that was Greg, if I wrong.

00:14:11

Greg had sort of spoke about how he found them really useful because demonstratively they um they caught missing cases that you know they they added that kind of digital safety net underneath it. Sorry to interrupt you. Our camera is doing funniness. It's moving. It's not showing both of us. Oh my goodness. Sorry, guys. Because is my face that photogenic? It's exactly. I think it focuses on the person that speaks. So, I just let it do let it do its thing. Get closer and see if um Yeah, we just stay very close.

00:14:46

Zooms in. Come on camera, we can do So we have things like QA tools and um you know self accounting software stuff that you kind of know but it just saves your time to just not have to go sit there and go one person. Those sorts of pieces were really really useful. We also the conversation veered off a little bit as well towards the kind of the future of digital pathology AI because AI is obviously a a big focus when you think digitalology tools. Um, can you start talking about digital planning

00:15:16

diagnostics, personalization and where that's going? Exactly. Because this is something we were talking and the fun activity as well and the fun activity was horse riding. So yeah, there's going to be a lot of footage from horse riding. We went on a trail. It was fun. It was the best. Honestly, if you ever get a chance to visit Utah at this time of year, the colors, I couldn't have expected it. And I didn't expect to be going up and up and down on the horse either. I'm really really grateful for

00:15:47

uh it that that helped me. And you had SL. Yeah. And they were best friends. Yeah. Our horses were best buddies. Yeah. Basically, we were just Ian was first. So when you look at the vlog later, she's going to be my main character in the vlog. She was like, "You're back basically." But yes, so we were riding horses. And um so this is also another cool thing about the summit that you have these excursions. So the day basically ends like at 12, right? We eat lunch and then everybody goes to the to play together.

00:16:19

And last year I went to ATVs. You weren't here last year. Yeah. So we had fun ATVs. I had my whole family and this year uh I couldn't bring them all but I came and I picked the picked the horse riding. So I did do didn't regret it. No, it was so beautiful because now the the colors are so beautiful and the weather was just perfect. Perfect excursion. Um, but on this excursion we were talking about digital diagnostics. Yeah. And you got to talk to everybody that went there. I felt like that was it

00:16:54

was a lot easier to kind of just just spend more time learning essentially. Yeah. And it's a different environment, you know, like you go, we go to a lot of conferences, you go to more conferences. Yeah. You have like often the same people and this you do the same things. You like walk around the exhibit hall, lectures, and then you go for dinner. And this is just like taking you out of your comfort zone. And I think it just sparks different type of conversation when you're in a different environment. You

00:17:31

other technology. I mean the digital technology got you excited. Oh yeah. Yeah. Because one thing was like what is the most exciting thing in the health space? Health tech space. Yeah. Health tech space. So tell what was yours and then I think I just find 3D printing fascinating. And then 3D cell printing. Yeah. specifically because you can you can do the prosthetics, you can do like the bits of the surgery and that's obviously very useful and coming in the near heart. Yeah, I find that fascinating to

00:18:04

talk about it but then yours was also equally kind of Yeah. So I recently learned about synthetic blood like without antigens, non-antigenic synthetic blood that I think um they started working on it and using it in Japan and it has a longer shelf life than the blood from from humans and also um the main reason of unsuccessful blood transfusion is because there is no match or there is no testing to see if it's a match. So you basically like waste blood and then now they have a synthetic thing that looks

00:18:40

like strawberry milk in a blood bag. I'm going to explore a little bit deeper this topic because that was my it was fascinating talking about it. Yeah, I'd love to learn more about that. I need to I need to find the publication. Uh but yeah, but going back to the topic of personalized imagebased diagnostics. Yes, digital CDX. digital CDX. So, one of the CDXs that is kind of already famous since last year is the one um created discovered I don't know what they call them. Developed developed good word developed by

00:19:18

Astroenica. So, they have a a biomarker image based biomarker uh IHC for trapto or torpto we need to Google. uh I always forget what trapto trapto so uh the interesting thing about this biomarker is not that it's like IHC on an image like there are plenty of biomarkers like that but that the uh predictive value of this thing is in the ratio between cytoplasmic and um the membrane staining. So basically something that a human cannot calculate in their mind. So there's no human pathologist ground truth. There's not

00:20:04

going to be a comparison to a pathologist scoring. It's all based on comparison to outcomes. And this is how they guide a clinical trial enrollment uh for that particular medicine that they have that targets this this pathway this biomarker. H but I thought this was fascinating because it kind of takes us out of this space of oh pathologist is the ground proof which I don't want to say that pathologists are not a good ground truth because we're doing our best always but uh we're like limited by

00:20:36

the physiology of our eyes and and definitely calculating ratio of intensities in cell is not something I would want to do visually but that's just one and you said that there's There's the space is growing. Yeah, the space is growing. There's um so I can't speak for any like individual because they're not concept but farmer is a a lot of different players working on different CDS algorithms different education. So um astroenics oh we have our users look they are helping trap to normalized membrane

00:21:12

ratio. You guys are amazing. You are digital pathology trade blazers helping us out in this live stream. I love it. You are so cool. Thank you so much. Where are you tuning in from? We want to give a shout out to your place as well. And yeah, I of course interrupt the floor of your conversation. No. Um well there's there's nothing too specific that I can talk about because it's um the reason that you see many digital many farmer companies investing in digitalology is they're using it for

00:21:44

biome discovery but they're also thinking about um that kind of commercial opportunity pairing it with so far is as it's developing more and more personalized therapies ABCs drugs is a massive trend that's seen as one of the forefronts of healthare um they are realizing that they are so fine-tuned to a specific population, but they also need to be able to better identify who's going to be able to respond to those and because not everybody will. And part of the digital programs at Farmer is in identifying

00:22:18

whether or not there's a community based algorithm that can correctly identify candidates for these drugs that are coming through. Um now there are lots and lots probably hundreds of um and most vendors are either talking to farmer or already working something on something based on this. So with Astroenica data and obviously digital then we will see more years. Um so yeah it's it's something that's really exciting and that I think a lot of speakited about as well. Um because there's so much about image that we

00:23:08

don't necessarily know that you measure things like relationship between characters different things like special [Music] time but it's something that if you're interested and also low Like when you think of scaling and commercializing even when you do highlex for discovery and for identifying you then want to like figure out how to distill it. It's so expensive and the data storage is even worse than digital quality in general. So hypex yeah but we're not thinking that that's in the next 5 years

00:23:54

that's just not going to happen here. And also I don't think it needs to be a clinical tool unless there is something that measurable of value that it adds. Exactly. Uh yeah. So so I see it very much as a discovery tool. But um but that's why you saw recently I know Moxylex and I'm going to sit and there's going to be a video about Moxylex. Yes. Yes. Yes. And tomorrow there's going to be a video about so it's not going to be live because it's kind of just closed door for the not

00:24:28

members for the participants of this summit but uh we're going to be visiting a lab installation where Lumea has uh their installation and Hamamatsu scanners uh are there as well and there's going to be a video coming out so stay tuned for that. What I wanted to address about the um image biomarkers is because we had this discussion okay like people think oh it's going to now massively accelerate the drug development timeline. Yeah. And how I see it, I don't think so because it's more of identifying new

00:25:04

things, new I don't think that's going to accelerate the drug development timeline, but there are there's there's certain bits of it like digital pathology that's used in clinical trials to sort of aid the digital. Let's do a shout out to Proscia and talk about what they did because I thought that was an interesting um like creating this hub. So I encourage you to go to the press release um but pro recently announced um Aperture um which is essentially um something that they've launched to

00:25:38

enable and facilitate better patient environment for clinical trials but also um sort of better um sort of measurement and quantification of biomarker studies when when they're available. So, Prochip serves both farmer life sciences and um clinical players and they're looking at bridging that gap between the two. Farmer's always looking for more clinical data. Um they're all to supplement what it exactly is that they're doing. Um and Prochure has launched Aperture as a way to provide

00:26:07

added benefit to clinical users as well because if you sort of enroll patients in a trial, you you get some revenue from that. So, as opposed to um districtology costing, this is something that provides a little bit of value back um for those that choose to adopt um and and and make use of it essentially. I find it really I do find it exciting. Yeah, I think it's so it's a it's kind of a logical concept, right? So, so they're an image management system like at the core and then they have a lot

00:26:36

more in this pretty powerful. So on the clinical side, the diagnosticians are basically using it to review cases and then you said there's like some kind of alert system to that matches the clinical trials and and theology system is kind of like that that software system where the diagnosis is like it goes then to the diagnosis but immediately you know in the in the digital that that patient has been having that condition. So at that point proious software enables um if it's been sort of flagged and turned on um the

00:27:18

notification if that patient already is you know qualifies for a study of the life sciences to the life sciences provider and to the provider of the healthcare without sharing anything that's um you know patient identifing yeah and pinging and saying hey did you know that this might be useful um if you wanted um so That's Yeah. If you Yeah. Yeah. And after so I kind of peripherally know how difficult it is to manage a clinical trial from conversation. So my husband he is working for a pharma company that is

00:27:57

running one right now and and yeah it's difficult. Then I had obviously uh guests on the podcast who work in clinical trials and just praise the value of digital pathology in the recent podcast that was uh not not the most recent like two podcasts ago. Monica Lamba Si and um the and Tom Ker from Barco. We were talking about color and different things, but also emphasizing how important that is for uh clinical trials like the management and especially of global ones. It's like crazy like I don't know how people ever

00:28:36

managed to run trials without digital pathology and keep managing doing that. H like to me it's like the most logical application. It's not mainstream yet um unfortunately but yeah creating this hub where you know everybody who runs trials can get like alerts that there are potential candidates for the trials and for the patients like I have personal stories where people were waiting for diagnosis for a month and then the trial opportunity was gone. So um yeah really interesting excited to see that

00:29:16

what end users essentially how well they accept it how they adopt it but also what they look for is probably one of those applications where surprised as well. Yeah. Yeah I think so. So yeah, basically climbing the digital pathology mountain and I don't know it was a theme or maybe just something came to my mind. It's like people are making fun. They're having fun. No, we're almost done, guys. Don't go. Don't go yet. Uh one last sentence is that um I know this environment is so

00:29:57

intimate because it's so few people and you do like these different things and um you meet people who have already like achieved what many institutions are striving for and you meet them in an environment where you have the like you don't only see them on stage and you think oh this is the uh highly recognized expert and let me read let me read his papers. you basically can talk to them and see how open and how willing they are to help anybody who's starting and one one nice thing from last year uh there are also a

00:30:34

few pathologists so it's not just pathologists there are pathologists here but um a lot of decision makers a lot of pathologists entrepreneurs or physician entrepreneurs managers vendors so it's it's very much um like the deal maker ers of this industry as well and analysts, some podcasters as well, you know, vloggers also make it into the mix. H but uh for example, last year I remember a person who just was like getting into this space. Uh she is a practicing pathologist and she was

00:31:12

looking for a remote digital job and today I meet her and she says I'm working fully digital fully remotely. I'm like, "Yes, the way to go." Love this. Yeah. So, thank you so much for joining me on the Thank you so much. I don't know which camera to look at, but this one is my main one. Uh, thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for staying till the end. And this means you are at digital pathology trailblazers. If you're considering uh conferences for next year, definitely consider this one

00:31:42

and like very powerful event, very intimate and fun in a fun place. Um I hope we can do this next year again, right? If not then at P Visions and if not then at Global Engage uh or be at Puff Vision soon. Yeah, like San Diego. If you guys are at Pot Visions, I'm gonna organize a lunch. I'm gonna send you join my email list. Let me put this link for the email list. And also, when you join it, when you scan this code, you also will get the book, not the paper version, but the digital version. And you're going to be

00:32:24

on my email list. And then I'm going to let you know if you're going to have visions and when is lunch. And I'm definitely inviting for lunch. So, see you there. Thank you. Bye. Talk to you in the next episode.