Mount Sinai Health System tapped Royal Philips to create a state-of-the-art digital image repository of patient tissue samples. Today, the samples are  available only on glass slides.

The work aims to advance clinical research and ultimately enable better care for complex diseases, including cancer.

Pathology, including the examination of patient tissue samples, is recognized as one of the cornerstones of modern medicine.

[See also: Mount Sinai drills down on care.]

The Mount Sinai Health System comprises seven hospital campuses serving approximately 170,000 inpatients and 2.6 million outpatients annually. Over the years, these sites have collectively stored hundreds of thousands of tissue samples on glass slides.

"The digitization of pathology gives us the unprecedented opportunity to access vast amounts of unlocked data and view it within the context of other images, results and clinical information," said Frans van Houten, CEO Royal Philips, in a news release. "It is our vision that our improved understanding of these data will help us enable better, more individualized care with greater confidence."

[See also: Mount Sinai links EMR with DNA.]

"This collaboration with Philips has the potential to help drive a new paradigm in healthcare that includes the optimization of treatment efficacy and superior clinical outcomes," added Carlos Cordon-Cardo, MD, chairman of the Department of Pathology at Mount Sinai. "Our ultimate goal with this initiative is to translate data into knowledge to maximize personalized patient management."