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Surfing NASH serves yet another preview of a highly anticipated and upcoming EASL Congress in Vienna, this time focusing on a strong lineup of abstracts and engaging sessions. This final conversation comes in the form of a topical extra-sode which fits seamlessly into our ongoing event coverage. Surfing NASH has partnered with HistoIndex to produce a deep dive session into AI and pathology with Arun Sanyal and David Kleiner. This high-caliber, stimulating discussion will improve your nuanced understanding of the challenges in using ordinal manual histopathology in NASH clinical trials and how AI systems might ameliorate or minimize these challenges.

An aim of this discussion is to establish a backdrop for an episode later this year when a major clinical trial investigating these issues will be released. The conversation starts with an important and telling digression. Roger asks David, Senior Researcher at the National Cancer Institute and chief pathologist of the NASH CRN, how working on NASH compares to diseases like hepatitis C. David explains that disease and drug-related effects are far more complex in NASH than in hepatitis. He reasons that where hepatitis, a far more stable disease, only looks at fibrosis, NASH additionally considers steatosis and ballooning. Arun notes three benefits of AI: it can stabilize and standardize reads from the sample, it can provide information about the history of disease that a one time manual read cannot and it allows the researcher to layer in molecular and other tools to drive a far deeper understanding of underlying pathology. From here, the conversation focuses on the many benefits of AI assistance, including the value of improving measurement by creating continuous variable scoring, the ability to examine through multiple dimensions to determine what matters most and generally developing a richer, more nuanced understanding of liver health and disease.

Today’s episode is sponsored by HistoIndex, the first global company to provide stain-free, fully automated imaging solutions for visualizing and quantifying morphological and architectural features of fibrosis. HistoIndex couples breakthrough biophotonic technology with an AI-powered digital pathology system to provide consistent, high-throughput imaging in liver disease and cancer. The platform benefits clinical research and speeds development of drugs and diagnostics. For more information, visit www.histoindex.com.

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