The Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, will be launching a new report by the TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) on introducing more automation in the NHS. As families and businesses face a 50 year high tax burden, the government has a duty to provide good value for money. The NHS is an essential service which needs to see further improvement and less money wasted.…
Nuance Communications, Inc., at its Customer Experience Summit, revealed Project Pathfinder, a breakthrough technology that uses machine learning and Nuance AI innovation to increase the conversational intelligence of virtual assistants (VAs) and chatbots. Project Pathfinder reads existing chat logs and transcripts of conversations between agents and customers within contact centers, and…
The lab-in-the-box design of LabTurbo SP-qPCR All-in-one system offers true automation for the molecular laboratory, the manufacturer reports, adding that this ‘delivers testing confidence and laboratory efficiency. LabTurbo fully automates the complete workflow of molecular diagnostic laboratories. The sample-to-result procedure includes: automatic sample transfer from primary tubes, DNA/RNA…
HORIBA Medical announces that the Yumizen G1500 (open tube) and Yumizen G1550 (closed tube) are now available. These fully automated analyzers can manage the diagnostic and monitoring requirements of clinical laboratories with a mid to high workload. Expanding their field of blood-diseases expertise, directly linked to hematology, HORIBA Medical is now able to offer its customers, dedicated and…
Integrated healthcare provider Primary Health Care has joined forces with Siemens Healthineers to deploy more than 70 Atellica Solution immunoassay and clinical chemistry analyzers. This marks Siemens Healthineers largest contract for in vitro diagnostics testing in Australia, and one of its most robust sales of the Atellica Solution. The analyzers are integrated with Atellica Diagnostics IT…
Often referred to as the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of histopathology, the sample entry has posed considerable challenges in pre-analytics for several decades. We visited the Munich-based lab automation start-up Inveox GmbH. Time-intense, highly manual processes in labs are expensive, error-prone and the most common reason for irregularities in cancer diagnoses. In Germany alone, every year hundreds…
Inpeco FlexLab automation (Inpeco brand FlexLab) is now connected with Sebia Capillarys 3 TERA, Sebia’s latest generation capillary electrophoresis instrument.
Clinical laboratories need to meet greater testing demands, improve efficiency, and deliver reliable, high-quality results, while at the same time, facing an increasing shortage of skilled employees and growing budget constraints. Both patient and physician satisfaction are frequently tied to the time it takes to receive lab test results. In a recent survey commissioned by Siemens Healthineers,…
The need to ensure that laboratory medicine can meet the future challenges of a rapidly changing healthcare environment sits at the core of an innovative strategic conference for this sector. The agenda of the European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (EFLM) Strategic Conference in Mannheim (18-19 June) highlighted the challenges, and also outlined areas of discussion to…
AI-based applications will replace radiologists in some areas, the physicist Bram van Ginneken predicts. ‘The profession of radiologist will change profoundly,’ predicts Gram van Ginneken, Professor of Medical Image Analysis at Radboud University Medical Centre. The cause is automatic image analysis by computers (first published in a paper in 1963) and deep learning.
At the 28th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2018), Fast Track Diagnostics, a Siemens Healthineers company, launches a new molecular thermocycler, the Fast Track cycler, and the complementary new FastFinder software. The Fast Track cycler is a compact platform that enables laboratories of all sizes to implement molecular testing with simplicity and speed…
Mass spectrometry is moving laboratory medicine to increasingly automated discrete analysis methods, resulting in ever faster and more reliable results. It is also leveraging economies of scale as an increasingly cost-effective tool, says Craig Webster, Consultant Clinical Scientist and Clinical Lead, Department of Biochemistry and Immunology at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham. Speaking about…
In the next five to 10 years, artificial intelligence is likely to fundamentally transform diagnostic imaging. This will by no means replace radiologists, but rather help to meet the rising demand for imaging examinations, prevent diagnostic errors, and enable sustained productivity increases.
Some time in the distant future artificial intelligence (AI) systems may displace radiologists and many other medical specialists. However, in a far more realistic future AI tools will assist radiologists by performing very complex functions with medical imaging data that are impossible or unfeasible today, according to a presentation at the RSNA/AAPM Symposium during the Radiological Society of…
What effect does a particular cancer medicine or radiation therapy have on patients? To find out, physicians use CT images to determine whether a tumor’s size changes during the course of treatment. In the PANTHER project, a joint team of experts aims at gaining further valuable information from these images. In the future, doctors will be able to find out at an early stage whether a cancer…
Researchers used machine learning techniques, including natural language processing algorithms, to identify clinical concepts in radiologist reports for CT scans, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published in the journal Radiology. The technology is an important first step in the development of artificial intelligence that could interpret scans and…
Automation might be the solution for many of the challenges radiologists and clinicians face today. Toshiba Medical, a Canon Group, is currently pushing the boundaries of what automation can accomplish and presenting their project in progress at this year's RSNA. Overwhelming volume of clinical data every day, limited access to relevant clinical information, missed findings and lack of…
An SLAS Technology review article by Yiyan Li, Xing Yang and Weian Zhao of University of California, Irvine highlights and synthesizes representative emerging micro- and nanotechnologies, as well as automated systems for bacterial identification (ID) and antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST), including both phenotypic and molecular methods and those at the point-of-care (POC) setting. Also…
Intelligent IT solutions are key in meeting today’s and tomorrow’s challenges in healthcare management. Ensuring patients get the attention and individual care they need in time – in light of growing budget constraints and ever-increasing regulations, this is one of the key resource struggles healthcare organisations face today. Healthcare personnel only have as much time on their hands as…
A Swiss hospital group is using drones to fly medical laboratory specimens between its key centres. In what is believed to be a world first, the eight-hospital Ticino EOC organisation has partnered with Swiss Post and US drone manufacturer Matternet to spearhead faster, more efficient specimens transport.
Acknowledging the need for faster ultrasound automation, Dr Alexander Weichert explained how automated procedures can assist in the early detection of cardiovascular disease and prenatal diagnostic testing, and why a detailed prenatal diagnosis can reduce mortality and morbidity.
In the nineties Deep Blue, the famous chess computer, defeated Kasparow. Only a year ago Google’s Deepmind managed to master the ancient Chinese Go, known for its utmost complexity.
The reasons why doctors request urinary analysis are varied – perhaps to detect a possible or suspected infection, or to screen for kidney diseases. In all cases a reliable and rapid result is the major aim. Urinary microscopy and culture have been the mainstays of urinary analysis for many, many years both of which require time and specialist handling.
Combining the physical separation power of liquid chromatography with the mass analysis capability of mass spectrometry – i.e. liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) – enables accurate, sensitive and selective separation, detection and identification of molecules in complex mixtures such as blood, serum and urine.
When it comes to automation, clinical microbiology has for many years lagged behind other laboratory disciplines. Robotics and computer processing revolutionized chemistry and hematology instruments decades ago. Meanwhile, clinical microbiologists continue to open specimen containers by hand and grow bacteria using methods familiar to microbiology’s founding fathers from the 19th century.
