Digital pathology pilot enables One Dorset to reshape service
Fujifilm Digital Pathology Solutions has partnered with One Dorset Pathology Network to operate a one-year pilot at Royal Bournemouth Hospital. The network aims to extend the solution to a fully digital workflow for cellular pathology across its sites at Royal Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset County hospitals.
The One Dorset partnership is the first of Fujifilm’s direct awards from the recent PathLAKE digital pathology initiative. PathLAKE is one of a network of five new centres of excellence in digital pathology and medical imaging, and has been supported by a £50 million investment from the Data to Early Diagnosis and Precision Medicine strand of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, managed and delivered by UK Research and Innovation.
“There are many reasons why we chose to partner with Fujifilm for this project,” said Royal Bournemouth Hospital senior biomedical scientist Ashley Ballard. “Through its partnerships with Sysmex and Inspirata it is able to provide a scanner that could rapidly process all slide types to produce excellent quality images, and display the images on an intuitive workflow solution. This will allow us to eventually scan 100 per cent of our slides in a laboratory with a limited footprint.
“Fujifilm’s support of cloud computing for digital slide storage is a crucial component in making this project feasible. It is rare in histology that an opportunity comes up to truly reshape the service, but with the introduction of digital pathology and our partnership with Fujifilm we have the chance to radically change how things work for the future.”
The pilot will include a high capacity scanner at the Bournemouth hub laboratory, a low capacity scanner at the Dorset County site, workstations for all the pathologists, as well as AI, macro imagers and voice recognition. Ballard believes these new digital systems will help attract and retain skilled scientists and pathologists, as well as provide training opportunities to develop staff.
Picture: Senior biomedical scientist Ashley Ballard.
Published on page 23 of the June 2021 issue of RAD Magazine.