Partner Case Study | Aiforia

For years, AI has promised to help people work more effectively, make smarter choices, and concentrate on what’s truly important. This is especially relevant in healthcare. With increasing diagnostic workloads and a shortage of specialists putting pressure on health systems globally, many organisations are looking into how AI can assist healthcare professionals without undermining the essential expertise integral to patient care.

Aiforia, a digital pathology software company founded in 2013 in Helsinki, Finland, is at the forefront of this effort. As a long-time partner of Microsoft, Aiforia leverages Microsoft Azure to enable pathology teams to analyse digitised tissue samples more efficiently and consistently, transforming traditionally manual workflows into scalable, AI-assisted operations. With 5,000 users in 50 countries, they’ve processed over 1 million images and created thousands of AI models.

The scope of Aiforia’s work covers both clinical diagnostics and research applications. They provide CE-IVD-certified diagnostic support tools and tailored AI model development for pathology labs. The CE-IVD certification ensures that these solutions comply with the European In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR), focusing on security, governance, and reliability in both their development and deployment. By harnessing Microsoft technology, Aiforia helps healthcare organisations securely manage and analyse vast datasets of pathology images, supporting increasingly sophisticated AI models in highly regulated clinical settings.

This potential is currently being realised within the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Aiforia is collaborating with University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust to investigate how AI-assisted pathology can enable clinicians to meet the rising diagnostic demands, particularly related to lung cancer, with improved speed, accuracy, and consistency.

Southampton caters to a diverse and complex patient base within the NHS, and its pathology teams are under mounting pressure to provide accurate diagnoses quickly and reliably. Like many healthcare institutions worldwide, Southampton is grappling with increasing diagnostic workloads amid a shortage of trained professionals, leading to a pressing need for tools that support clinicians without compromising the essential expertise involved in patient care.

This challenge is especially pronounced in pathology, where specialists scrutinise high-resolution digitised tissue samples that inform crucial treatment decisions, particularly in cancer care. Despite advancements in healthcare tech, many pathology workflows remain heavily reliant on manual review. Pathologists continue to manually analyse vast, intricate histology landscapes while striving for precision, consistency, and governance amidst growing caseloads.

Even for seasoned clinicians, maintaining the rhythm and uniformity can prove challenging. Minor variations in interpretation can lead to inconsistencies between different observers, especially in complex areas like quantifying PD-L1 biomarkers in lung cancer diagnostics. For healthcare organisations already under strain, enhancing standardisation while alleviating manual workloads has become essential.

Within the NHS, healthcare leaders are examining how digital pathology and AI analysis could tackle these challenges without sidelining clinicians from the decision-making process. Through the PathLAKE Plus procurement framework, Aiforia has been designated as an approved AI vendor supporting over 25 NHS trusts. The University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust has pioneered the first deployment of Aiforia’s technology within the UK NHS, laying the groundwork for its wider adoption across the NHS.

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