Noteworthy news from medtech start-ups. This month we profile Ibris, which is developing prognostics to identify breast cancer patients in need of chemotherapy, and Delphinus Medical Technologies, whose platform enables 3-D full breast ultrasound.

Patients with aggressive estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer need chemotherapy in addition to treatment with anti-estrogen therapies. The question for physicians: how to determine how aggressive a cancer is going to be? Ibris Inc. is working to provide that information with a rapid, predictive, prognostic test that can identify ER-positive breast cancer patients requiring chemotherapy.

Among diagnostic specialties, anatomic pathology is the last holdout against the digital revolution. Pathologists still detect disease by looking at tissue samples on a glass slide through a microscope, just as they have done for a hundred years. But in the last couple of years, start-up companies have begun to break the bondage of pathologists to slides. Their solution: platforms for digitizing slides so they can be accessed through computer networks by clinicians anywhere in the world. Two start-ups, Aperio and BioImagene, have led the way and now all the big imaging manufacturers, the microscope companies and biomarker developers want in.

A roundup of recent medtech strategic alliances, mergers & acquisitions and financings.