Overview

The advent of digital scanners for microscopy slides, and the ability to exchange scanned pathology images through a digital network make remote reviewing a reality which the Collaboration Platform for Pathology (COPPA) attempts to cover.

The collaboration capabilities offered by COPPA help pathologists to share knowledge and to work together towards a common goal. The overall aim is to help them conclude to the right results, among patients participating in a clinical trial.

COPPA provides to the stakeholders all the necessary tools & functionality in order to have images reviewed by multiple reviewers and to manage and log the whole procedure. It also provides collaboration capabilities such as messaging, scheduling, definition of multiple user roles & groups, as also configurable core elements such as mechanisms for custom review protocol definition schemas and an expandable business workflow.

Data quality is a central concern in clinical trials because poor data quality can lead to biased estimates of important clinical parameters and compromise the validity of whole studies. In particular, inter-observer variability can be a powerful confounder that invalidates the conclusion of the analyses.

COPPA is aiming to help in data quality assurance by implementing support for central review of pathology data, where a panel of expert pathologists (or groups of pathologists located in different organizations) is nominated and they review & annotate the same set of samples together.

Target Applications

COPPA’s field of use is in any case where a group (or multiple groups) of pathologists (or other clinical users) have to work together on specific sets of digital pathology data. The primary use of the platform is in a clinical trial environment but it can easily converted to be used as a repository of digital pathology images in a laboratory.

Description

COPPA is a cloud based automated and centralized system for defining and conducting review protocols for digital pathology images among multiple reviewers.

The platform provides to the pathologists a plethora of collaboration tools, knowledge sharing tools and many other specialized technical tools. In more detail, the core of the tools of the platform are:

• Automated reporting forms, for reviewing digital pathology images
• A digital slide image viewer & annotator tool
• An automated procedure for conducting the review and
• A conflict resolving tool, which uses a wizard in order to guide the moderator to resolve any issue in a few steps

COPPA is a complete solution which adapts to the user needs through a highly customizable architecture. COPPA adopts an organizational (User Groups) and functional (User Roles) structure, through the organization of all of its end users in communities. In every community each user has specific privileges & capabilities. Key features & tools are:

• Custom & reusable review protocol schemas, using user defined parameter sets (e.g. ER analysis, PgR Analysis)
• Per review protocol a patient selection process is initiated with a well-defined lifecycle
• Multiple specialists participate in the review process
• Improvement of the qualitative results through the utilization of knowledge sharing tools
• Reduce of the time needed to conduct a review process
• The review results are stored in a central repository and then can be easily reused at any time
• Virtual microscope functionality
• An annotation mechanism which supports regions of interest (ROIs) and detailed description for each one

Additional Information

For additional information please contact us.