West Midlands Secure Data Environment (West Midlands SDE) hosted by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust has awarded a contract to Histofy to support to support advanced annotation and AI-driven enrichment of whole-slide images.

The service will support the annotation of digital pathology whole slide images (WSI) in preparation for their availability for approved research cases, enabling researchers across the West Midlands to access high-quality, well curated pathology data. Digital pathology WSI’s represent a rich and value source of data, with significant potential to support the development of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and innovation research that can assist pathologists in diagnoses and generate critical insights for the treatment of a wide range of diseases.  By enabling consistent high-quality annotation, the new service will help streamline analysis improve collaboration and accelerate translation of research into benefits for patients and the public.

The appointment follows a competitive procurement process and will provide a scalable and secure solution that can evolve in line with the growing needs of the research community while maintaining robust governance and data protection standards. This investment reinforces West Midlands SDE commitment to enabling trusted, high impact research using secure health data to support better outcomes across the West Midlands.

As part of this agreement, Histofy will provide access to its proprietary Helix platform, which delivers rich annotation of digital pathology images at scale. This contribution will enhance over 500,000 whole-slide images already hosted within the SDE, making the dataset significantly more valuable for researchers, clinicians, and future AI developers working to improve outcomes in a variety of cancers.

Professor Simon Ball, SRO of West Midlands SDE remarked:
“This exciting development builds on West Midlands SDE’s established capabilities in managing whole-slide images and multimodal data. It will further enable data-driven research and innovation, optimising the value of existing resources such as the PathLAKE dataset, alongside emerging real-world data from the West Midlands Digital Pathology Network and future novel datasets.”

Professor Nasir Rajpoot, CEO of Histofy commented:
“This marks a major step forward in making high-quality, structured pathology data widely accessible for research and innovation. We’re proud to partner with the West Midlands SDE to enrich one of the country’s most important pathology image datasets and unlock its potential for the next generation of AI-powered discovery.”

Professor David Snead, Chief Medical Officer at Histofy added:
“This collaboration is a key milestone in the responsible adoption of AI in cellular pathology and builds on the foundations laid during the PathLAKE project. By embedding expert-validated histological features directly into the dataset, we’re not just scaling annotation, we’re setting a new standard for what high-quality digital pathology data should look like.”

This work is funded by the NHSE Data for Research and Development programme.