The shipping container parked behind UPMC Shadyside Hospital may not look high-tech, but researchers hope that what’s happening inside can lead to better disease diagnosis. And having that technology housed in a container means it can hit the road easily.

The container is called the ScanVan™, and it is in Pittsburgh as part of a partnership between the technology company Leidos and the University of Pittsburgh’s Computational Pathology and AI Center of Excellence (CPACE) team.

“The ScanVan is a container that is relocatable, so it can be placed at a hospital for a few months, then relocated with only a few days’ work to set up at another location,” said Todd Minnigh, vice president of XMS at Leidos QTC Health Services. “The purpose is to scan thousands of microscope slides from hospital archives. These digitized images can then be used for education, clinical research and artificial intelligence (AI) development.”