HeteroGenius Limited, as part of the Northern Pathology Imaging Co-operative, receives £10m government investment for AI and digital pathology

The Northern Pathology Imaging Co-operative (NPIC) have been awarded a £10.1m investment from UK Research and Innovation to expand a digital pathology and artificial intelligence programme across the North of England. Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), announced the investment today (Tuesday), as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. The consortium, led by the University of Leeds, will receive an additional £7m in the form of donations from industry.

This investment means that the consortium is now set to become a globally-leading centre for applying artificial intelligence (AI) research to cancer diagnosis.

Dr Derek Magee from HeteroGenius Limited said: “As one of the principal AI partners in the project, this is a huge opportunity for the company to showcase our technologies and image analysis know-how in a clinical setting. The project gives us access to a large number of clinicians and researchers as well as access to substantial amounts of image data to develop and validate new AI based algorithms for patient benefit.”

NPIC will put new digital pathology scanners into a network of northern NHS hospitals, including all of the hospitals across West Yorkshire and Harrogate, to gather digital pathology images for training AI systems. This will generate about 760,000 images per year, about 1.2 Petabytes of data.

NPIC will engage patients and the public in a programme of work about the use of anonymised images for AI research. It will also inform the development of a ‘national pathology exchange’ - software that allows images to be shared between NHS sites nationally so that patients can benefit from second opinions from anywhere in the UK. 

HeteroGenius Limited
HeteroGenius is a Digital Pathology software and services company based in Leeds(UK) that has developed cutting edge technology for image analysis deployed in an easy to use web based framework. The focus of the company is on facilitating pre-clinical research in Universities, CROs and Pharma. Our modular software allows automation of tedious and time consuming tasks such as cell counting and tissue type identiication, IHC quantification and tissue type area quantification. HeteroGenius AI technology is based on powerful bespoke Convolutional Neural Networks (“Deep Learning”) which have been in use in the pre-clinical domain for over two years.

HeteroGenius also provides outsourced analysis services and develops bespoke analysis methods and workflows. Get in touch to discuss more about the type of solutions we can provide. info@heterogenius.co.uk

NPIC members
The Northern Pathology Imaging Co-operative (NPIC) is led by the University of Leeds and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Its 26 members include the University of Manchester, University of Nottingham, University of Oxford, Heterogenius Limited, Microsoft Limited, Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, Sectra Limited, Newcastle University, Roche Diagnostics Limited, University of Sheffield, Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust, FFEI Limited, Clinisys Group Limited, Airedale NHS Foundation Trust, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, University of Liverpool, X-Lab Limited, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, mTuitive UK Limited, Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Futamura Chemical UK Limited and Leica Biosystems Limited.