According to CEO Kaisa Helminen, Fimmic Ltd is a software company that operates in the medical sector. The company provides software solutions that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision in tissue section analytics.
Fimmic’s staff consists of professionals from various fields who have comprehensive knowledge of medicine and software development, as well as solid experience in deep learning AI technologies and life science business.
WebMicroscope virtual microscope arose from research
Fimmic’s software solutions are originally based on inventions created by the company’s Chief Scientific Officer Johan Lundin and his brother, Director of Concept Design, Mikael Lundin. The brothers, who are both medical doctors, originally developed the cloud-based software platform for research use, to speed up the analysis and sharing of extremely large microscope images taken from tissues sections. However, growing commercial interest and meeting an experienced life science entrepreneur, Kari Pitkänen, inspired them together to establish Fimmic Ltd in 2013.
The virtual microscopy software, named as WebMicroscope, was commercialized immediately after the initiation of business operations. One of the first customer segments was medical education. WebMicroscope is still used in all Finnish faculties of medicine.
“It was very important to have the commercial product already available when the company was established”, Helminen states and continues, “thanks to our history, we also had a good understanding of the customer needs and the market.”
User experience with the first-generation microscope application was of great value when Fimmic began developing the newest software version, based on machine vision and Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence brings precision, reliability and reproducibility
According to Helminen, Fimmic is the first company in the world to bring Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence into action to support tissue section analytics.
The next-generation WebMicroscope software has been developed to mimic human perception of sample analytics. Unlike a person however, artificial intelligence always analyzes the sample in a consistent manner. This translates into unprecedented precision, reliability and reproducibility. For instance, the application can be trained to recognize cancer tissue and to analyze cancer-specific biomarkers within the tumor area.
“Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence revolutionizes tissue sample analytics and diagnostics. This technology enables fast automatization of even complex image analysis tasks. Time will be spared for more complicated samples, while routine samples can be analyzed more rapidly in a more consistent way”, Helminen specifies.
The WebMicroscope Software is utilized broadly in medical research and education as well as in drug development. It has been used in cancer, liver disease and Parkinson’s disease research, to name a few. The service is available worldwide: Fimmic has customers in Europe, North America and the Middle East.
Next the company aims at bringing the latest version of the intelligent digital microscopy application to the clinic to assist in diagnostics, and wishes to broaden the market of the new software version, in the United States and Asia in particular.
