German Startup, Elea Leverages AI to Boost Productivity in Pathology Labs

Hamburg-based startup Elea is applying AI in an underserved healthcare niche, pathology labs, TechCrunch has reported. Elea AI in pathology labs will entail automating analysis of patient samples for disease before scaling up to AI-powered workflow systems that enhance lab productivity.

Higher Productivity

At the initial stages, Elea’s pathology lab automation tool will change the way clinicians and any other staff in labs work. Elea sees an opportunity to increase productivity in the manual pathology lab workflows.

“We basically turn this all around, and all of the steps are much more automated. Doctors speak to Elea, the Medical technical assistants speak to Elea, tell them what they see, what they want to do with it,” Elea CEO and co-founder Dr. Christoph Schröder said.

With its AI-powered tool, the startup will replace legacy information systems and shift workflows to AI-based operating systems capable of deploying speech-to-text transcriptions to reduce the time needed to make diagnosis.

Elea has been running its digital pathology systems with its first batch of users for about half a year. The healthcare AI solutions startup says its systems have effectively redacted the time that labs take to generate about 50% of their reports to two days.

“Elea is the agent, performs all the tasks in the system and prints things, prepares the slides, for example, the staining and all those things, so that tasks go much, much quicker, much, much smoother. It doesn’t really augment anything, it replaces the entire infrastructure,” Schröder added.

Scaling Initial Product

Elea is developing several large language models by fin-tuning data and specialist information to facilitate core capabilities in pathology lab contexts. The startup embeds speech-to-text capabilities to transcribe voice notes. It also embeds text-to-structure capabilities, allowing its systems to convert transcribed voice notes into active directions that power actions of AI agents.

These actions include sending instructions to lab kits to facilitate workflows. Currently, the focus of the digital pathology systems startup is to scale its initial product. The integrated system can stack up and compound gains by replacing tedious tasks. Elea’s pitch to labs shows that processes that could take two to three weeks can be achieved within hours or days.

The startup offers users a range of touch points. Lab staff can access the system through iPad, web, or Mac applications. Once Elea has developed its lab use case fully, it will shift to areas where AI application in healthcare is widespread. The company plans to support doctors in capturing patient interactions while focusing strongly on workflow.

The Risk Factor

Although automating pathology labs with AI will lead to higher outputs, it could pose a challenge to checks because staff have to deal with huge volumes of data. Schröder sees this as a risk. He however argues that his company has developed a feature that allows AI to identify potential gaps through prompts that encourage doctors to review outputs again.

“We call it a second pair of eyes, where we evaluate previous findings reports with what the doctor said right now and give him comments and suggestions,” he says.

The other risk that Elea AI technology poses is breach of patient confidentiality due to reliance on cloud-based processing as opposed to on-premise processing that labs can control. Schröder says his startup addresses this issue by separating patient identity from diagnostic outputs.

“It’s always anonymous along the way, every step just does one thing, and we combine the data on the device where the doctor sees them. We have basically pseudo IDs that we use in all of our processing steps, that are temporary, that are deleted afterward, but for the time when the doctor looks at the patient, they are being combined on the device for him,” Elea CEO said.

Schröder said that the company stores patient data in servers that comply with stringent data privacy laws.

“We work with servers in Europe, ensuring that everything is data privacy compliant. Our lead customer is a publicly owned hospital chain, called critical infrastructure in Germany. We needed to ensure that, from a data privacy point of view, everything is secure. And they have given us the thumbs up,” he added.

Founded in early 2024, Elea has already signed a partnership with a leading German hospital group that processes up to 70,000 cases each year.