Pathomation PMA.core Software With Support for Cloud Storage and FTP Servers

Through its PMA.core software, Pathomation BV provides an universal image management solution.

Its latest release offers versatile options for storage.

Digital pathology insiders know that scalable image server software is one of the most important tools to wield in any real-world implementation of the technology.

Through its PMA.core software, the company provides an universal image management solution (also referred to as a ‘tile server’) with support for any kind of imaging modality (brightfield, fluorescence, z-stacking, wsi, gross). At present, it can handle 38 different file formats from various vendors.

Just as important as the potential to take in different vendors, are the options offered for storage. Its latest release offers the most versatile options for storage available yet.

Scaling up to cloud infrastructure is now possible.The company natively supports the S3 protocol, which was designed by Amazon for its own AWS cloud platform. Since the S3 protocol has been adapted by a variety of cloud storage providers, cloud storage through IBM Objects, NetApp, HGST, Arvados, and others, is therefore possible, too.

Azure storage also supported.
Local, network, and cloud storage are not the only locations where slides are stored. Many places in the world don’t support high-bandwidth networks. In order to allow the roll-out of digital pathology in the most remote places, PMA.core’s mounting points can now also reference legacy FTP infrastructure.

PMA.core excels when it comes to handling transitions and scaling. A typical project evolves with an initial set of slides on a local (server) HDD. Once a PoC is built, slide volume often increases so that local storage is no longer sufficient and larger volumes are maintained on networked storage.

Yves Sucaet, CTO, explains: “PMA.core can provide a seamless transition of such project trajectories. Applications that connect to PMA.core are unaware of the underlying physical storage model of its data. Therefore, end-users can be switched over from one type of storage to another, with minimal impact.“

PMA.core’s architecture allows to scale up as time progresses, moving to single server to networked storage to cloud, while connecting remote legacy endpoints via FTP.

Pathomation offers an image management and tile server to use as a foundation for digital pathology projects, whether you decide to build a high-tech or a low-budget environment.