About Us

Corista was formed in 2005 by a team of software and healthcare professionals that recognized the need for improved methods to manage and manipulate medical images.  Corista’s senior management team has been at the forefront of solving many of the problems inherent in the practical use of digitized medical images.  Now they are applying their combined experience and foresight to Pathology, one of the most challenging medical areas.  Bringing together experts in software development, image compression, distribution technology, business development and a Board Certified Pathologist, Corista’s CEO, Liz Wingard, is focused on the requirements of this next frontier.

Radiology began the movement to a digital platform over 25 years ago. Today nearly all hospitals use PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) to manage Radiological images where they are available to all physicians in a hospital from a single platform.  PACS has become the market standard for Radiology over the past 20 years.

Corista’s founding management team recognized the advances found in PACS for Radiology would, one day, be adopted in systems for Pathology.  However, the needs of Pathologists are different from Radiologists. Pathology uses color images and need extreme levels of image clarity, previously available only from the light microscope. These requirements present daunting challenges.

Progress has been made and many see the age of Digital Pathology just over the horizon. Over the past few years, digital cameras have been able to capture extreme levels of detail which produce digital images comparable to the light microscopes. In addition, digitizers have come to market, which can produce virtual images of extreme clarity.

The problem to be solved is this: the resulting images are too large to effectively manage, running 3-7 GBytes each. With JPEG and/or JPEG2000 applied, these images are reduced to 200-500 Mbytes each. At this compressed size, images are still too large to be successfully managed and transmitted between floors, across a hospital campus or between medical centers.
It is also uncertain whether all compressed images using lossy compression are fully acceptable for diagnosis. Corista is developing solutions for these barriers to Digital Pathology.

Corista is a voting member of DICOM and is active on both the Compression (WG-04) and Pathology (WG-26) committees.