Fujifilm partners with One Dorset Pathology Network
Year-long pilot marks next step in plans to fully digitise pathology services
Fujifilm Digital Pathology Solutions has announced a new partnership with One Dorset Pathology Network to operate a year-long pilot project at Royal Bournemouth Hospital.
The network aims to eventually extend to a wider installation, introducing a fully-digital workflow for cellular pathology across its sites in Bournemouth, Poole, and Dorset County.
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 £50m 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 (UKRI).
“There are many reasons why we chose to partner with Fujifilm for this project” said Ashley Ballard, senior biomedical scientist at Royal Bournemouth Hospital.
“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 easy-to-use and intuitive workflow solution. This will allow us to eventually scan 100% 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 re-shape 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 the installation of 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 solutions.
We believe this approach offers a strong, flexible solution, with each partner offering expertise in their field and an open platform to deliver bespoke systems which can fully encompass the technologies required by modern pathology organisations
Ballard said the new digital systems will help attract and retain skilled scientists and pathologists, as well as providing training opportunities to develop staff. He also expects the systems will significantly improve productivity, efficiency, quality, and turnaround times; directly benefiting patient care.
“We are excited to be partnering with the One Dorset Pathology Network as they embark on their digitisation journey”, said Emma Hodgkinson of Fujifilm UK.
“With our open-platform approach, Fujifilm has combined our experience of implementation and support of medical diagnostic solutions across enterprise-wide programmes with modern digital pathology software and hardware from experienced, innovative providers.
“We believe this approach offers a strong, flexible solution, with each partner offering expertise in their field and an open platform to deliver bespoke systems which can fully encompass the technologies required by modern pathology organisations.”