Remote town in hilly area. no transport and no laboratory and no doctor. patient has to go to a town that is 100 km away to get his blood or urine examination which is fundamental investigation to clinch the diagnosis in modern medicine.
In many cases, critical diseases go undiagnosed till it is too late. This could be because of the lack of access to quality healthcare. It could also be due to the inefficiencies in the healthcare delivery system. Whatever the cause might be, the effect is ultimately tragic — unnecessary suffering and loss of human lives.
More specifically, that there is one pathologist for a population of more than 65,000 people.
With the aim of making the life of the pathologist easier and thereby improving patient outcomes, their focus lies in automating the inefficient and error prone manual microscopic review process for the most common tests — blood and urine microscopy.
A Scientist Builds AI-Enabled Device to Help Diagnose Diseases in Under a Minute.- Dr Dastidar began working on the problem of how to prevent such fatal instances of medical misdiagnosis. He founded SigTuple in 2015.
The idea behind SigTuple was to build artificial intelligence that could help early screening and diagnosis, possibly in underserved areas, which would make life better for the end patient.
Mitigating the loss of human lives
Taking
a multi-disciplinary approach, SigTuple combines AI, robotics, microfluidics
and cloud computing to create intelligent diagnostic solutions that make
quality healthcare delivery affordable and accessible.
One key device they have developed in this regard is the AI100, which offers a solution combining software and hardware components. The hardware is an automated slide scanner, capable of converting any physical specimen into digital images.
The
AI platform analyses these images and provides clinical insights into the
sample, which brings down slide review time for the pathologist and allows them
to seamlessly work remotely or collaborate with their colleagues across
geographies.
“Microscopic
review of blood samples is a gold standard for diagnosis of many critical
diseases. This includes something as serious as the various forms of leukaemia.
This process remains predominantly manual in more than 96% laboratories
globally and is thus the biggest bottleneck in terms of turnaround time for
sample reporting,” explains Dr Dastidar.
“Being
manual, it is also prone to errors. Most importantly, blood microscopy is by
far the largest use case of the microscope in a clinical laboratory. The idea
behind AI100 is to automate the microscopic review of blood samples through
robotics and AI, to make the process standardised, reduce turnaround time, and
improve quality of reporting,” he adds.
AI100 was ready for beta testing starting early 2019. SigTuple deployed the beta version into many labs, and used the opportunity to gather customer feedback and smoothen out any rough edges.
SigTuple’s AI100 device . How does it work?
In
normal laboratory practice, a blood sample is smeared on a glass slide and then
reviewed under the microscope.
With
this device, instead of a pathologist reviewing the slide under the microscope,
the slide is inserted into AI100. The machine automatically captures high
magnification microscopic images of the relevant portions of the slide and
uploads the images to a cloud platform.
“The
AI module resides on the cloud platform. It analyses the images, mimicking what
a pathologist would do while reviewing it under the microscope. The result of
this analysis is then presented to the pathologist on a web browser, which
makes the report accessible from anywhere and anytime. The pathologist reviews
the AI suggested report and then approves it.
This
process helps the current workflow in many ways.
First
of all, the pathologist need not be in the lab to report on the sample.
“Imagine
a critical patient requiring immediate attention in the dead of the night.
Earlier, the pathologist had to rush to the hospital or the patient had to
wait. Now, that is no longer necessary, as the pathologist can report from
home, while the sample is in the laboratory where the AI100 machine is present.
Further, since the AI does most of the job of the pathologist, it makes her
more efficient, by reducing the review time. She can now concentrate more on
the really critical patients, rather than wasting time on near normal samples,”
he explains.
Finally,
the AI is free from fatigue-related errors that impact human pathologists. It’s
better at detecting those rarer and easy to miss abnormalities. This ultimately
improves the end patient outcome. With AI-enabled automated digital microscopy,
the sample review process by a pathologist, which used to take 5 to 10 minutes,
has come down to 30 seconds today. Also, thanks to this technology, a
pathologist can now review approximately 300 slides per day as compared to 30
slides with manual microscopic solutions, according to Dr Dastidar.
“This
is how AI, robotics and cloud all come together to improve the
speed and accuracy of diagnosis. Also, apart from blood, AI100 can also analyse
urine samples. Urine microscopy is the second most common use of the microscope
in the clinical laboratory. Soon, other and more specialised tests will be
enabled on the same platform,” he adds.
Improving care in Tier 2 and 3 cities
SigTuple
is also focused on equipping Tier 2 and 3 cities by installing their device in
pathology labs and introducing the need for advanced automated digital
microscopy, which will help cope with the dearth of pathologists.
“Most
laboratory chains are stunted in their ability to open up quality diagnostic
centres in Tier 2 and 3 cities (and even beyond), by the inability to find a
good pathologist for such labs. So, they typically operate in a hub-and-spoke
model, where samples from smaller cities and towns are transported to their
main centres in larger cities. This has its obvious drawbacks — increased
turnaround time, sample degeneration while transport, and so on,” explains
Bhadani.
Microscopy
requires the physical presence of the pathologist in the lab. Most other
functions in the lab can be performed digitally, with technicians at the lab
running the machines.
“AI100
enables the labs to perform microscopy digitally over the internet, obviating
the need to have the pathologist physically present in the lab. Given the
increased efficiency of the pathologist due to the AI, the same pathologist can
now look at many more samples in a day than what she could do earlier. This is
how SigTuple is helping laboratories in their foray into smaller cities and
towns.
Comments
Post a Comment