Techcyte and Pramana Unveil Smart, Inline, Volumetric Digital Microbiology Scanning 

Techcyte and Pramana today announced the upcoming launch of smart, inline, volumetric scanning. This innovation aims to set the standard for how microbiology slides are digitized. Techcyte algorithms can now be run on Pramana scanners during scanning, delivering the highest quality imaging of parasitology, gram, and AFB slides.

Digitizing microbiology slides is a significant challenge for most whole slide scanners. Wet preps, sparse slides, and varying sample thickness can result in whole slide images that are not acceptable, which negatively impacts operational costs and manual labor. Many scanners can scan multiple z-stacks, which increases scan time, file size, and processing and storage costs. 

In contrast, Pramana’s Spectral series scanners use sophisticated software and a powerful GPU to enable real-time volumetric scanning, capturing Z-stacks and fusing the best pixels to produce high quality images. The original Z-stacks can be retained for further review in areas where AI identifies significant objects. The software also features onboard quality control to detect and correct focus, artifacts, and stitching issues, without user intervention.

Building on this foundation, Techcyte’s AI algorithms (for research use only) can now be deployed directly on Pramana’s scanners, the first and only to offer edge AI compute capabilities. During scanning, the AI analyzes each field of view in real time and can flag relevant objects, mimicking the fine focus function in a microscope with AI automation. Z-stacks are saved only in those areas around the objects of interest. 

“This capability allows us to advance the practice of digital microbiology,” said Ben Cahoon, CEO at Techcyte. “Smart inline volumetric scanning brings intelligence into the digital scanning process, helping provide labs with in-focus and z-stacked images that bring the benefits of going digital to microbiology.”

“Smart inline volumetric scanning brings to reality the vision that we had for our platform from day one,” said Mike Koenig, Chief Business Officer at Pramana. “Pramana’s scanner architecture allows us to support complex sample types from partners like Techcyte with speed and precision—now enhanced even further by inline AI.”

This joint innovation sets the stage for expanded digital adoption in areas like bacteriology, parasitology, and cytology, where object-level resolution in three dimensions can be helpful for reads. It will be showcased at ASM Microbe in Los Angeles, June 20–22, at Booth 1811 and will be available to customers in Q4 of 2025.