Alverno Featured in Northwest Indiana Business Magazine

A clearer picture

Joel Markanich, director of molecular and anatomic pathology operations at Alverno Laboratories of Hammond, said they recently adopted artificial intelligence to improve early diagnosis of prostate, breast and gastric cancers. Alverno is partnering with Ibex Medical Analytics of Tel Aviv, Israel, which has developed algorithms to help pathologist to detect hard-to-find cancer sites. Alverno daily processes hundreds of biopsies — body tissues extracted from suspicious growths — for 21 hospitals and scores of independent pathologists across Indiana and Illinois. Their central lab slices biopsies into thousands of microscopically thin wafers, scans them into digital images and dispatches them by computer to pathologists for examination. Markanich said Ibex culls suspected malignancies out of a multitude of otherwise benign tissue samples and flags them for additional testing to confirm whether it is cancer. “So, AI can pick up something that could have been missed with the naked eye and then prioritize their caseload,” he said. “We are really excited to have started last May using it on prostate tissues. We added breasts in November. We are waiting to see if we get those efficiency gains.”