Case Western Reserve University researchers have been awarded two grants totaling $3.16 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create analytic software for managing, annotating, sharing and analyzing digital pathology imaging data.

Anant Madabhushi, a professor of biomedical engineering, will lead a seven-institute consortium to expand the capabilities of a freely available pathology image viewer, building what they call a “pathology image informatics platform” (PIIP).

To begin, the PIIP will focus on tools for quantifying tissue-based biomarkers and disease patterns on digital images of prostate and breast cancer biopsy.

“A large number of people realize the potential clues within images,” Madabhushi said. “We need to develop the right tools to unlock the data. … This could help drive the precision medicine revolution.”