NPIC has announced a significant advancement in cancer diagnosis for West Yorkshire and Harrogate. Six NHS hospitals serving three million people have collaborated to introduce a cutting-edge digital pathology service. This achievement, three years in the making, promises faster cancer diagnoses regardless of patients’ proximity to specialist centers.
Traditionally, diagnosing cancer involves pathologists examining tissue samples on glass slides under a microscope, a process hindered by the need to transport fragile slides between hospitals. The new digital pathology system at the West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT) scans slides in ultra-high definition, enabling instant, secure sharing with experts across the network. This initiative marks a major step towards the broader adoption of digital pathology across the NHS.
Dr Craig Sayers, Consultant Histopathologist at Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, based at the Dewsbury site, said: “Since implementing NPIC digital pathology, we have seen increased efficiency in local MDT (Multi-Disciplinary Team) preparation. The time required for secretarial and laboratory staff to retrieve glass slides and for Consultants to review cases has decreased. Referrals for second opinions and central MDT reviews, common between WYAAT Trusts, are now easier without needing to transport physical slides. At the Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust, all Consultant Histopathologists have embraced digital reporting. With our histology slides now digitised, we look forward to trialing and implementing AI solutions to further improve turnaround times, especially for cancer cases”.
Graham Prestwich, NPIC Patient and Public Advisory Group Chair said: “NPIC’s digital platform has proven valuable in patients’ journeys by delivering faster results, reducing the anxiety associated with waiting for test results. It also provides access to a specialist’s second opinion for everyone, regardless of their location, helping to reduce disparities in care. By involving users and potential users in every aspect of the project process, NPIC has demonstrated the importance of including people in all aspects of their health and care services. This promotes full patient participation and shared decision-making”.
Professor Darren Treanor, NPIC Programme Director and Consultant Pathologist and Honorary Clinical Professor at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, commented: “World leading technology is now available in West Yorkshire to accelerate cancer diagnosis. As a specialist cancer centre, we receive hundreds of patients’ samples per month from hospitals in the region, with typically 10-day delays. Now, an image can be shared securely in an instant – two experts can even look at a digital image of the same slide, at the same time. We are proud that NPIC is the first in UK to embark on a single digital pathology system of this size, providing a scalable infrastructure that could support digital pathology for the whole NHS.”
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, where NPIC is headquartered, is home to the largest repository of digital pathology slides in the UK and has been digitally scanning every slide since 2018 thanks to their partnership with Leica Biosystems. The creation of the WYAAT digital pathology network is the cornerstone of NPIC, and aims to deliver improved cancer diagnostics for patients across the region. The WYAAT project will involve scanning in excess of 750,000 slides each year, which if stacked on top of each other would be more than six times the height of Bridgewater Place – the tallest building in Yorkshire.
Over the last three years, the WYAAT project has involved:
• Transformation of the six pathology departments using cutting edge technology, including deployment of 15 new scanners from Leica Biosystems on hospital sites
• High-speed networking infrastructure to allow large amounts of data to be transferred in just seconds
• Creation of a world-leading secure digital pathology infrastructure, with 29 Petabytes of mirrored storage across two datacentres
• Development of the world’s largest digital pathology vendor neutral archive (VNA) capable of supporting clinical digital pathology in the whole NHS for years to come
Building on the success of the WYAAT digital pathology network the larger NPIC project will see 238 pathologists using digital pathology in 40 hospitals in England, scanning over five million slides and generating in excess of seven Petabytes of data per year.
“Implementing digital pathology is a major transformation project for pathology departments,” commented Bash Hussain, NPIC Deployment Director. “Successful deployment across the WYAAT network represents a major milestone for cancer diagnostics in the region. This ambitious programme is being led by NPIC and enabled in partnership with world leading industry experts including Leica Biosystems, Sectra and Exponential-e to provide unmatched technology and expertise in this exciting and expanding field.”
Pathologists across the region are ramping up their usage of digital pathology, which aims to provide faster patient diagnosis through rapid, secure sharing of cases enabling efficient use of pathology expertise in the six WYAAT hospitals.
Digital pathology is also a key area for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for pathologists to speed up or improve diagnosis. In the future, computer algorithms could support pathologists in detecting small areas of cancer that have spread to lymph nodes, quantify and measure tumours, and rapidly direct pathologists to areas of abnormality in the tissue sample. Today, the digitisation of histopathology departments in the WYAAT network represents an important step towards the widespread adoption of technology that would make the use of AI solutions possible.
