Philips Reveals Digital Pathology Scanner with Native DICOM Support

Philips announced that it’s expanding its SG300 and SG60 scanner offering with the Pathology Scanner SGi with configurable DICOM JPEG and DICOM JPEG XL output.

The company hails this as the first technology with native DICOM JPEG output. DICOM JPEG XL files are up to 50% smaller but still provide high image quality, so pathology labs can store, manage, and analyze growing volumes of digital pathology data and enable more productive workflows in the cloud and on premise.

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the international standard for medical images and related information. Digital pathology is a relatively new imaging modality compared to radiology, so there was no established DICOM standard in place. Due to this, vendors created their own proprietary formats.

The DICOM standard also facilitates collaboration between pathology and other imaging modalities, scaling cross-modality integrated diagnostics and decision-making, and consolidates IT infrastructure through archiving both radiology and images in a single location and archive.

Imogen Fitt, Principal Analyst at Signify Research, said adopting DICOM in pathology marks an important shift toward scalable, interoperable imaging workflows.

“As pathology labs face mounting data volumes and storage demands, the move to standardized formats helps reduce infrastructure costs and enables integration with a wider range of AI tools,” Fitt told the press. “Philips’ support for DICOM JPEG and DICOM JPEG XL as a native output from its scanners illustrates how vendors are aligning with these trends, intending to support capabilities such as centralized archiving, cross-modality diagnostics, and remote collaboration for customers.”

Philips’ digital pathology offering includes whole-slide scanners, image management system, and implementation and support services to guide the transformation from analog to fully digital pathology workflows. Philips’ collaboration with Amazon Web Services, offerings for cloud archival services, allows pathology labs to efficiently and securely store, manage, and analyze growing volumes of digital pathology data.

“As a leader in digital pathology, Philips is innovating digital pathology workflows that scale efficiently, integrate seamlessly and reduce storage costs,” said Martijn Hartjes, Business Leader Clinical Informatics at Philips. “We want to ensure our customers are realizing benefits today while being future-ready—with solutions that are flexible, interoperable, and scalable—so they can deliver better care to more people.”