Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust selects Indica Labs to deliver its digital pathology solution with HALO AP

Following a formal tender process, Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust has announced the selection of Indica Labs to aid in full digitization of the pathology workflow. Indica Labs will deliver its leading digital pathology software, HALO AP^®, fully integrated with existing hospital systems, alongside multiple Hamamatsu Nanozoomer scanners.

NUH, comprising two campuses, is the third largest NHS trust in England providing services to 2.5 million residents of Nottingham and a further 3 to 4 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 AI solutions needed in NHS pathology labs. Digitization of the pathology workflow at NUH was made possible by PathLAKE Plus which is massively expanding digitization across the NHS in order to put AI solutions developed by PathLAKE into practice.

Dr Tim Taylor, the 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 analyzing 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.”

Indica Labs’ HALO AP software will be used to manage and view scanned slides for primary diagnosis, secondary consultations, tumor boards, multi-disciplinary 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.

“Digitization, automation, and AI can play a vital role in supporting pathologists to meet growing workloads and increasing diagnostic complexity,” said Founder and CEO of Indica Labs, Steven Hashagen. “Indica Labs is delighted to participate in this exciting initiative, and we are committed to helping the NUH NHS Trust, and the wider PathLAKE Plus consortium in realizing the promise of this technology.”

David Snead, Founding Director of PathLAKE, and consultant pathologist at the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire said: “UCHW NHS Trust is proud to be leading PathLAKE Plus, the world’s largest implementation of digital pathology and AI to date, which will deliver the benefits of AI across a population base of 17 million people.

“The ambition is to deliver digital pathology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the benefit of NHS patients. Digital pathology has already proved its worth during the pandemic, by allowing the remote working of pathologists. However, it paves the way for the implementation of emerging AI technologies that will ensure we deliver the best possible results for our patients.

“Digital pathology is the future for tissue diagnosis and offers myriad opportunities to improve the quality of care for patients, PathLAKE Plus will be realising these benefits over the coming months and years. We are grateful for the support of Indica Labs, one of a team of commercial suppliers supporting PathLAKE Plus, that have made the project viable through their contribution.”

The PathLAKE Plus project has been supported by funding from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) through UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) data to early diagnosis challenge in 2018, alongside additional scale-up funding for the digital pathology and imaging AI program from the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC).

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