News

Flagship Biosciences to present at the premier toxicologic pathology conference in Japan Boulder, CO – January 23, 2010 – Flagship Biosciences LLC,(Flagship) will present at a Digital Pathology Session at the 26th Annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicologic Pathology, Japan’s premier organization for the application of toxicologic pathology in human health. Dr. David […]

Measurement of hepatocellular glycogen is an appropriate exercise in determining level of gluconeogenesis in rodent efficacy studies for evaluating potential antidiabetic compounds.   However, accuracy in glycogen quantitation requires strict control of the fasting period in all study animals because intracellular levels can vary greatly depending on postprandial time.  Technical challenges in visualizing glycogen also exist because it  is highly soluble, and […]

Industry has accepted relative scoring of toxicity lesions for many years.  However, the real demand from investigators in the area of discovery toxicology is for quantitative toxicological pathology data. In the scenario below, there are four images of periportal fibrosis in the livers of diabetic rats. The upper left, the control, clearly shows an increase in liver fibrosis as compared […]

There are  many times when a pathologist needs to randomly sample tissue in a directed manner.  This is to assure that similar tissue substructures are sampled in a manner that prevents biasing of results.  If the problem was as straightforward as sampling ANY area, then random sampling  algorithms would have already been developed for this.  Unfortunately in real […]

The more that we use whole slide analysis, the more we are amazed that anyone tolerates the old way of doing things: doing image analysis or manual reads on small “representative” sample areas. Let’s look at a mouse spleen example. Histology pattern recognition was tested on mouse spleen sections in an effort to quantitate normal […]

If there is one image analysis question we hate, it is, “Can you perform image analysis on this badly overstained slide?”. The answer is frequently “No”.   Although in some circumstances, image analysis can overcome issues of overstaining , nonspecific staining or just plain bad histology, there are definite limits.  These issues usually greatly dimish the accuracy […]

Experienced pathologists are very good at using minimum magnification to look at a slide. A pathologist can see more scanning an entire slide at 5x and then occasionally jumping to 20x or 40x in a couple of areas, than starting out at 40x. We all know this, and take it for granted as pathologists. However, […]

The first digital pathology services company formed by pathologists to serve the needs of drug and device development Boulder, CO – October 9, 2009 – Flagship Biosciences LLC,(Flagship) was created as a new company entity by two experienced pathologists to leverage the use of emerging digital pathology technology. Whole slide imaging allows a pathologist to […]

Analysis of fibrous capsules is a common procedure in evaluation of coated devices.  Microvessel analysis was tested for use in identifying the fibrous capsule differences between a novel coating and a control polypropylene in a subcutaneous rodent implant model.     Microvessel algorithm was modified to detect the fibrous capsule, as shown below. In this […]