Dear LabPulse Member,
LabPulse.com has an early milestone coming up. We've been up and running for almost four months now, and the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) meeting in Anaheim, CA, from August 4-8 will mark our official debut to the laboratory medicine community.
We're looking forward to catching up on developments in precision medicine, artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and high-sensitivity cardiac troponin markers, among many other topics at AACC 2019. Look out for our daily coverage online, and follow us on Twitter @LabPulse1. Come by and visit us in the exhibition hall -- No. 4326; we hope to meet some of you in person.
Today we feature results from a survey of how laboratories experience the customer service performance of IVD vendors. The survey of 300 lab professionals -- conducted by our sister company Kalorama Information -- evaluated a variety of factors related to customer service from the start of the product research process to satisfaction after sale and installation. Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information, will also be on the ground at AACC 2019, evaluating new product offerings.
We've also been keeping an eye on news about the deployment of artificial intelligence in pathology. Researchers in Israel recently reported success with a machine-learning method for analyzing hematoxylin-eosin stained images in breast cancer, though they acknowledged that immunohistochemistry is still the "workhorse of molecular genotyping." Meanwhile, South San Francisco-based Freenome reported that it has raised another $160 million in financing to develop an AI-driven blood-based testing method for the early detection of colon cancer and other tumor types.
In other news, researchers affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reported results from a large retrospective study that suggest a role for routine blood screening, with no need for fasting, to help identify and prevent diabetes early in the disease process, prior to the onset of complications. More research is needed into whether results from the VA databases are generalizable, the group concluded.
