Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust has selected US based Indica Labs to support the digitisation of its pathology workflow.
It is planning to use the company’s HALO AP digital pathology software integrated with the hospitals’ CliniSys WinPath laboratory information system, alongside multiple Hamamatsu Nanozoomer scanners.
The software will be used to manage and view scanned slides for primary diagnosis, secondary consultations, tumour boards, multi-disciplinary team meetings and remote reporting.
The move accompanies the PathLAKE Plus project, in which NUH is involved with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) and other partners, to deliver AI solutions needed in NHS pathology labs – which in turn has prompted a big increase in digitisation.
HALO AP is designed to deploy an array of AI tools developed via Indica Labs’ HALO AI platform, as well as third party AI solutions.
BEIS and DHSC support
PathLAKE Plus has been supported by funding from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy through UK Research and Innovation’s data to early diagnosis challenge in 2018, alongside scale-up funding for the digital pathology and imaging AI programme from the Department for Health and Social Care.
Dr Tim Taylor, clinical director of pathology at NUH, said: "We are really pleased that NUH has secured £2.3 million of funding from Innovate UK as part of a government initiative to develop digital pathology services across the NHS. This funding will allow our team of specialist consultant pathologists to move from analysing tissue biopsies using microscopes to using state of the art software from Indica Labs, reducing the time patients have to wait for diagnoses, particularly for those patients with suspected cancer.
“It will also allow our team of pathologists to work more collaboratively with pathologists in other Trusts across the region and opens the way to using sophisticated artificial intelligence tools to assist pathologists in the future through the PathLAKE Plus project."
Image from iStock, metamorworks
