Cirdan acquires Philips PathXL business

Medical informatics and imaging technology company, Cirdan has today announced that it has acquired the Belfast-based Philips Digital and Computational Pathology business (formerly known as PathXL).

Headquartered in Northern Ireland with offices in Canada and Australia, Cirdan specialises in developing technology that supports and speeds up diagnosis, primarily used by those working in pathology. The company’s main products are ULTRA, a Laboratory Information System which supports the operations of multiple public and private labs across the world, and CoreLite, an x-ray system that helps expedite breast cancer diagnosis.

Philips PathXL’s digital pathology, image analysis, deep learning and educational tools will complement Cirdan’s existing offering, and the synergies of both products and staff will significantly enhance opportunities to serve their customers across the world.

Speaking about the acquisition, Cirdan CEO, Dr. Hugh Cormican commented:

“We are excited by the prospect of being able to further invest in our laboratory informatics business with this acquisition. We have shared a close relationship with key members of the PathXL team over many years and are looking forward to combining our products and resources to bring the best of each to the industry. It has been our long-term vision for our products to be global technological leaders, and with the addition of PathXL we will be able to accelerate the inclusion of deep learning and digital pathology technology.”

PathXL was founded in 2004 as a Queen’s University Belfast spin out company and was purchased by Philips in 2016. It offers a range of digital pathology software applications for research and education addressing growing segments of the pathology market including bio-pharma.

Deep Learning is a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that focuses on solving real world problems from deep neural networks that mimic the way our brain makes decisions.