J U N E 2 0 1 9 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 8 5
CDx Diagnostics
WATS
3D
(Wide-Area
Transepithelial Sampling)
wats3d.com
The goal of this system is to more
reliably spot pre-cancerous cells
for removal in patients with chron-
ic heartburn or Barrett's esopha-
gus. It synthesizes dozens of 2D
optical slices of each 3-micron focal plane into one 3D image of the
entire 150-micron thick specimen. The pathologist gets an in vivo, en
face view of the gland to better diagnosis dysplasia that might have
been reported as "indefinite" with traditional methods. WATS
3D
not
only addresses the sampling error inherent in relying on random for-
ceps biopsies, but its three-dimensional computer-assisted analysis of
the tissue sample provides the GI pathologist with diagnostic informa-
tion that is not typically available using standard tissue-based
histopathology, says the company.
With this company's technology, you use a stiff brush on a wide area
of tissue. So it's not really random biopsies; you're sampling a much
larger area, and you send all that tissue to their lab. That in itself is no
particular innovation. But the clever thing is that they then put all
those tissue samples into a neural network that scans them. And
based on its experience with a large volume of previous samples, it
selects the samples most likely to possibly represent dysplastic or
malignant tissue. Then they present those to the pathologist for fur-
ther examination. So it lets you take a large volume of sampling, but
you don't need to ask a pathologist to look at every single slide.
Instead, you're using AI to select the most suspect slides, and then the
human expert can view just those, and confirm if there's a problem.
• PATHOLOGY IN 3D Dr. Schlachta dons 3D glasses to view
samples generated by the WATS
3D
system.
Joe
Paone
