Ventana and EMC Join Forces

Ventana Medical Systems, Inc., a member of the Roche Group, entered into an agreement with EMC Corporation to offer a  scalable and flexible solution to store and archive medical images as part of the Ventana  digital pathology solution for anatomical pathology labs.

Today’s pathologists increasingly rely on digital images scanned from patient slides, and those images must be of the highest possible resolution. The Ventana iScan family of slide scanners offers enhanced image resolution and throughput, which in turn requires significant increases in system storage capacity. Ventana turned to EMC to deliver secure, easy to manage, high-capacity storage for its digital pathology solution which runs on Ventana Virtuoso image and workflow management software.

"This agreement represents the combination of best-in-class technologies and expertise from two industry leaders, further increasing the value we can provide to customers," says Steve Burnell, PhD, digital pathology and workflow lifecycle leader, Ventana Medical Systems. "EMC’s sophisticated analysis of our customers’ storage needs, their reputation for quality, and continuous innovation, plus their global service capabilities mean that pathology labs all over the world can focus on analyzing patient slides, not managing storage capacity and archiving."

Scanning and storage solution for labs of all sizes
As digital pathology becomes the global standard, pathology labs of all sizes require an overall medical imaging storage solution that is cost-effective, flexible, secure, and scalable. Ventana has collaborated with EMC to optimize digital pathology storage configurations that will deliver the best performance and price for its wide range of global customers.

"By embedding EMC’s industry-leading VNX unified storage and information management products within the Ventana Virtuoso software, Ventana, as part of the Roche family of healthcare solutions, is providing their customers with a more advanced, scalable and integrated digital imaging solution. We are pleased to be working so closely with a leading research-focused healthcare company in an effort to help lab technicians and doctors around the world gain access to the most innovative technology to more effectively analyze human tissue as a means of diagnosing and treating life-threatening disease," said Tony Wood, GM, OEM solutions, EMC.

Technology
Ventana Virtuoso image and workflow management software is a web-based application that delivers a digital pathology workflow solution (now with Barco high-grade image quality displays) and offers pathologists a solution to simplify their workflow and collaboration with colleagues while maximizing efficiency, patient safety and data security.

The company’s solutions for Ventana include the VNXe unified storage platform, EMC Unisphere unified storage management, and EMC DiskXtender for placement and retrieval of images. As a result, the Ventana digital pathology solution can support higher storage capacities (up to 43TB), provide a faster, more automated and secure approach to archiving, and scale as customers’ needs increase.

Ventana plans to launch the newly integrated solution in North America, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa in Q4 of 2013.