Amersham Hospital is one of the first in the country to implement artificial intelligence (AI) to help provide swifter skin cancer diagnoses.
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust is working with the health tech company Skin Analytics to roll out its DERM product in Amersham Hospital’s dermatology unit.
The hospital is using DERM to reduce the number of appointments for patients with non-cancerous lesions, therefore giving more time for the team to see patients with skin cancer.
Skin cancer referrals to the NHS have continued to rise, with the NHS seeing 650,000 referrals for suspected skin cancer, an 11 per cent increase from last year.
Buckinghamshire has also seen a rise in referrals, with the trust revealing that there has been a 300 per cent increase since 2010.
With the help of DERM, patients who are referred by their GP will be invited to an imaging clinic, where photos of their mole/lesion are taken for analysis. The AI system can classify each image into cancerous and non-cancerous, allowing the team to triage skin cancer referrals more effectively.
Ryan Kerstein, consultant plastic and reconstructive surgeon for the trust, said: “The year-on-year increases in suspected skin cancer referrals was putting pressure on dermatology and plastic surgery services to maintain the level of care we wish to provide for our patients.
“We therefore needed to think differently and look at how we could streamline our services to meet the rise in demand.
“The partnership with Skin Analytics provided us with an opportunity to do this and absolutely demonstrates our commitment to adopting effective, leading healthcare innovation.”
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