Aiforia brings AI-assisted lung cancer analysis to NHS pathology workflows

June 17, 2026

For years, the promise of AI has been to empower people to work more efficiently, make better decisions, and focus attention where it matters most. In healthcare, that promise carries particular weight. As diagnostic workloads rise and specialist shortages continue to strain healthcare systems worldwide, organizations are increasingly exploring how AI can support clinicians without replacing the expertise at the center of patient care.

Founded in 2013 in Helsinki, Finland, Aiforia is a digital pathology software company focused on bringing AI into clinical diagnostics and medical research. A long-standing Microsoft partner, Aiforia uses Microsoft Azure to help pathology teams analyze digitized tissue samples more efficiently and consistently, transforming historically manual workflows into scalable, AI-assisted processes. With 5,000 users across 50 countries, Aiforia has analyzed more than 1 million images and developed thousands of AI models.

Aiforia’s work spans clinical diagnostics and research applications, including CE-IVD-certified diagnostic support tools and custom AI model development for pathology labs. The CE-IVD designation signifies that a solution meets European In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR) requirements for clinical diagnostic use, placing security, governance, and reliability at the center of how these systems are developed and deployed. Using Microsoft technology, Aiforia is helping healthcare organizations securely manage and analyze massive pathology image datasets—and supporting increasingly advanced AI models within highly regulated clinical environments.

That opportunity is now taking shape within the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), where Aiforia is working with University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust to explore how AI-assisted pathology could help clinicians manage growing diagnostic demands, specifically related to lung cancer, with greater speed, accuracy, and consistency.

Modernizing pathology workflows for growing healthcare demands

Southampton serves a large and complex patient population within the NHS, where pathology teams face growing pressure to deliver accurate diagnoses quickly and consistently. Like many healthcare organizations worldwide, Southampton is navigating rising diagnostic workloads alongside a shortage of trained specialists, creating an urgent need for tools that can support clinicians without disrupting the expertise and oversight at the center of patient care.

That challenge is particularly acute in pathology, where specialists analyze high-resolution digitized tissue samples that guide critical treatment decisions, including cancer care. Despite advances in healthcare technology, many pathology workflows still rely heavily on manual interpretation. Pathologists are manually reviewing and interpreting massive and highly complex histology landscapes while attempting to maintain precision, consistency, and governance across increasingly demanding caseloads.

Building AI-assisted pathology on Microsoft Azure

The initial deployment focused on PD-L1 biomarkers in lung cancer analysis. But deploying AI into regulated clinical environments introduced unique complexities. The organization needed infrastructure capable of securely handling enormous pathology image datasets while supporting the compute demands required for AI-assisted analysis, all within strict healthcare governance and compliance requirements.

To support the deployment, Aiforia brought together its AI-powered pathology platform with the scalability and security of Microsoft Azure. The company’s cloud-native architecture was designed specifically for the demands of digital pathology, where enormously high-resolution tissue images require GPU-intensive processing to analyze cell-level details. By using Azure for both storage and compute, Aiforia empowered Southampton to support AI-assisted analysis with a convenient service model. The local hospital doesn’t need to maintain the cloud environment—Aiforia provides this for them as a service.

Because the solution involved clinical diagnostic workflows, governance and reliability were central to the project. Azure’s global cloud footprint also supports regional hosting, security, and compliance requirements, allowing the teams to design security in from the beginning. The care needed to implement the solution extended the project timeline, and Aiforia provided support along the way.

“It has been fantastic,” said Dr. Victoria Elliot, Consultant Histopathologist at Southampton. “There are always lots of people on the call who are just waiting to get on with the work. They've never lost patience with us. Everyone's always incredibly positive, polite, and very communicative. We've been hugely impressed.”

Now the team at Southampton is ready to take it live and is excited for the solution to drive the speed and accuracy of their pathologists and diagnosticians. “What is quite appealing about these sorts of tools is that they have a human in the loop, where the human is still going to verify the results,” said Dr. Elliot. “In some ways, the AI is your helpful assistant.”

Creating faster, more consistent diagnostic workflows

As Southampton moves toward broader operational use of Aiforia’s PD-L1 solution, the organization sees AI-assisted pathology as an important step toward improving both efficiency and consistency across diagnostic workflows. The platform is designed to reduce repetitive manual analysis and help pathologists focus more attention on complex diagnostic decisions. “The AI tools are the icing on the cake,” said Dr. Elliot. “One of the major steps forward in terms of clinical provision and coping with demand is to implement AI and see benefits for our consultants and obviously for our patients.”

Aiforia’s validation studies suggest that those efficiencies could have meaningful operational impact at scale. In some pathology applications, Aiforia’s AI-assisted workflows have reduced diagnostic processing time by up to 68% through automated quantification and report preparation. Labs working with Aiforia’s technology have also been able to reduce expensive special stainings by 20% to 25%, lowering costs while still maintaining confidence in diagnostic interpretation.

The platform also addresses one of pathology’s long-standing challenges: diagnostic variability. By supporting more standardized image analysis and quantification, Aiforia aims to help pathologists produce more consistent results across reviewers and institutions.

“This is just the beginning of the journey,” said Dr. Vipul Foria, Consultant Histopathologist & Cytopathologist at Southampton. In addition to working styles becoming more flexible and global, Dr. Foria predicts that AI will change the way we look at pathology, interpret tests, conduct reporting, and arrive at a diagnosis. “How we look at molecular data and classify tumors will change because we'll have all this additional data that we don't know about yet. With that, patient management and newer therapies will change for the better.”

The team predicts that future innovations will unlock new opportunities when the use of AI technology expands in clinical practice. “An exciting opportunity for the future is to combine datasets—histology, genomics, radiology, etc.—to build prognostic and predictive models that help clinicians predict disease outcomes and treatment response,” said Kaisa Helminen, Chief Operating Officer at Aiforia.

For Southampton, the deployment represents more than a single implementation. As the first NHS trust in the UK to deploy Aiforia’s technology through the PathLAKE Plus framework, the organization is helping establish an early model for how AI-assisted pathology could scale across the NHS. The project also reflects a broader shift toward fully digital pathology workflows, where AI tools can operate alongside clinicians to support faster turnaround times and more efficient use of specialist expertise.

Looking ahead, both Aiforia and Southampton see additional opportunities to expand AI’s role within pathology and precision medicine. “We're all very busy, and the demand and capacity issue is ongoing and is probably going to get worse,” said Dr. Elliot. “Ultimately, we hope that those efficiencies will be handed on to the clinical service, meaning that we can turn reports and test results around for patients faster, so they can get the treatment they require as soon as possible, particularly for cancer patients, where time is so important.”