New technology at Central Maine Medical Center will help doctors diagnose patients faster.
Until now, pathologists, who study tissue samples to diagnose diseases like cancers, have used physical tissue samples on glass slides. But that means when a patient needs a specialist or a second opinion, those slides have to be mailed to the new doctor.
To speed up that process, Central Maine Medical Center is working with Spectrum Healthcare Partners, to offer a service that will digitize the samples- making them much faster to send, said Dr. Bilal Ahmad.
."But what we can do is by digitizing it, is having those few cases routed to the exact right people that are best suited to make that diagnosis," he said. "We're able to do it to some degree now, because we're able to ship around glass slides, but once it's digital, it's available instantaneously, and so we knock out a lot of the barriers."
And Ahmad said pathologists will utilize AI tools to analyze the samples, helping to identify the disease.
Central Maine Medical Center is the first hospital in the state to use this technology, and one of the first in the nation. But Spectrum plans to expand the service to other hospitals around the state, Ahmad said.
"So with this technology, we can actually liberate all of these slides just from the local folks here and have experts in Boston or California or Texas review cases for us on the fly," he said.
This service should make it easier and faster to diagnose diseases, including cancers, Ahmad said. It's especially important now as there is a shortage of pathologists in Maine, and the state has seen an increase in cancer diagnoses.
