From infrastructure to impact in digital pathology through partnerships and real-world evaluation

Background: The national pathology imaging cooperative, NPIC is the largest program of clinical digital pathology deployment in the national health service, having digitized over 3 million whole slide images across 20 UK hospital laboratories. Beyond large-scale digitization within a national pathology imaging network, NPIC builds on partnerships with healthcare providers, academia, industry, and patients to provide a platform for real-world evaluation.

Design: The NPIC research platform comprises a dedicated infrastructure, multi-vendor scanner facility, and multidisciplinary team for the development and real-world evaluation of artificial intelligence tools. The platform provides access to high-quality data and supports the creation of robust datasets through standardized workflows, governance, standards, regulatory frameworks, and ethical considerations for research.Partnership working and patient involvement, engaging with researchers across clinical specialties and multimodal initiatives linking pathology, genomic, and clinical data within the network and globally.

Results: NPIC has1. Built a scalable national digital pathology platform with 2 petabytes of mirrored storage, 19 scanners from 11 vendors, a secure image management system, and a multidisciplinary team enabling access to secure and reproducible data generation.2. Enabled real-world development and evaluation of artificial intelligence through a research environment comprising over 500,000 de-identified whole slide images.3. Formed global partnerships, supporting more than 30 research projects with academia and industry across clinical specialties and modalities.

Conclusion: NPIC demonstrates the added value of partnerships across healthcare, academia, industry, and patients in delivering measurable impact for clinical and research. It brings together a multidisciplinary team, scalable infrastructure, processes, standards, and regulatory frameworks to provide a single platform for real-world evaluation.

Learning Objectives

1. Case studies demonstrating the added value partnerships across healthcare, academia, industry for patient benefit.
2. Approaches for governed data access and integrated pipelines supporting real-world evaluation of artificial intelligence.
3. Sharing the NPIC journey from building an infrastructure to the translation of clinical and research impact.