Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has selected Indica Labs to aid in digitisation of the pathology workflow. Indica Labs will deliver HALO AP software fully integrated with existing hospital systems, alongside Hamamatsu Nanozoomer scanners.
Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust, comprising two campuses, is the third largest NHS trust in England providing services to 2.5 million residents of Nottingham and a further three to four million in the surrounding region. The pathology department processes approximately 70,000 histological specimens and produces 340,000 slides per year.
Two years ago, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) and NUH NHS Trust founded the PathLAKE project in collaboration with other partners. PathLAKE is working to deliver innovative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions needed in NHS pathology laboratories. Digitisation of the pathology workflow at NUH was made possible by PathLAKE Plus, which is massively expanding digitisation across the NHS in order to put AI solutions developed by PathLAKE into practice.
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 AI tools to assist pathologists in the future through the PathLAKE Plus project."
Indica Labs’ HALO AP software will be used to manage and view scanned slides for primary diagnosis, secondary consultations, tumour boards, multidisciplinary team meetings, and remote reporting. To further streamline the digital reporting workflow, HALO AP will be integrated fully with the hospital’s existing laboratory information system, CliniSys WinPath. Finally, in line with the PathLAKE Plus mission, HALO AP is designed to deploy a broad array of AI tools developed via Indica Labs’ HALO AI platform, as well as third-party AI solutions.