So two years have passed, and there have been some changes. Many changes...
And looking at the Daily Scan, a few of them are obvious; the blog's tagline used to be "Aperio's daily news and views about Virtual Microscopy"; we have enlarged and refined our focus and as you may know the company tagline is "Bringing Digital Pathology to Life", and so I changed the blog tagline to "Digital Pathology" as well. The difference being, Virtual Microscopy is the technology of scanning and digitizing microscope slides, while Digital Pathology is the field that includes all the software and tools for displaying, managing, and analyzing the resulting images, including managing all the metadata that apply to the specimens.
Another change is our logo; the logo at left had served us well for many years, but a little over a year ago we switched to the logo you see at the right. It is a bit cooler, and [we think] portrays us as a bigger company. And we are a bigger company; Aperio has grown a lot, we have about 120 employees now, and have placed over 350 systems in 25 countries. That's pretty amazing. And a lot of that growth has taken place in the last two years.
Anyway it was kind of fun to see what has changed, and what hasn't... looking at the "recent posts", the University of Leeds are still valued customers, for example; it was great to see we had just began working together in August of 2005. And Roper Scientific is still our distributor in Japan and China. On the other hand Release 7 is a distant memory, we are now just in the process of distributing Release 9, with 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 in between, each with a ton of features. We've continued hosting the Pathology Visions conferences, in the U.S. and Europe, and the 2007 attendance more than tripled that of our first conference in 2005.
Our product line has changed a bit, too; the ScanScope family now has four members, including the high-speed high-capacity XT, and the high-resolution OS which can scan at 100X using oil immersion objectives.
We've also expanded our Spectrum information management software, to help customers manage digital slides and the information that goes with them, including case, patient, and specimen information. (And for research applications, experiment and project information.) There are a lot more tools for analyzing digital slides and quantifying data, performing rare event detection, and reporting and exporting results.
Which brings me to perhaps the biggest change, which might be the least obvious from the outside; Aperio is now a medical device company. In order to seek FDA clearance on our systems, we had to transform our processes to be compliant with FDA Quality System Requirements. This affected every part of the company, from product marketing to engineering to quality assurance and testing to manufacturing to customer support. It was not easy (!), but it has paid off; not only have we received FDA clearances for key applications, we have many more in various stages, including some cool clinical trials to show the value of Digital Pathology in real world lab environments.
So there have been a lot of changes - and will be many more - please stay tuned...
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