Digital Pathology AI automation
Southwest Pathology Service in Taunton is using a TalkingPoint automation solution to drive the transfer of digital slides to an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to triage bowel biopsies.
Managing a case load of approximately 35,000 histopathology cases every year, Southwest Pathology Service is an integrated pathology service covering Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton and Yeovil District Hospital, Yeovil.
In Taunton, the pathology service has been an early adopter of digital pathology.
System Interoperability
With the adoption of any new digital healthcare technology, there are often issues around interfacing with existing systems.
Southwest Pathology Service in Taunton is using a TalkingPoint automation solution to drive the transfer of digital slides to an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to triage bowel biopsies.
Dr Fred Mayall, Consultant Cellular Pathologist, explains: “Our research group had developed cutting-edge AI analysis software but we needed to find a way to export digital images to allow them to be processed by the AI engine.
Emulating an expert user
The Pathology service at Taunton has been using TalkingPoint’s workflow automation software for several years to provide other process automation in the department, so it was a natural step to consider using TalkingPoint to provide a solution.
Dr Mayall explains: “The process that TalkingPoint now drives takes images from the scanner and passes them to the artificial intelligence engine. The AI can sort biopsies of the large intestine so that abnormal cases can be identified and prioritised for reporting.”
Downloading the images was a time consuming manual process. Users had to load the case, identify the specific slide required, select to export the file, wait for it to export and then save it – with each slide taking several minutes. In context, a typical gastrointestinal biopsy case may generate 10 or more slides, taking at least 20 minutes to download and save.
TalkingPoint’s automation emulates the activity of an expert user of the platform to do repetitive tasks at high speed.
“It would take approximately 90 minutes a day for a user to import the slides into the AI engine from the digital scanner; a process requiring repetitive case number entry, mouse clicks and long pauses, with constant vigilance. With TalkingPoint, the process can be left unattended – for example, we could leave it to complete overnight. The automation is robust. Importing the slides had become an onerous task whereas this task is now managed entirely by the TalkingPoint automation!”
Benefits of TalkingPoint Automation
The auto-import workflow for digital pathology was deployed at Somerset Pathology Service in 2021 and has been supporting the use of AI screening for bowel biopsies since. The automation, once started, operates without human intervention. It reads a file with all the required cases and drives the export process automatically, placing the image files into an image folder.
“This is a complex automation that drives browser-based software. After a successful initial test to check that TalkingPoint could control the software, an extremely robust workflow was built so that it would run unsupervised. For example, if something in the process doesn’t work, the workflow would find out why and then try again automatically.”
Malcolm Grant, The TalkingPoint Team
