While The London Clinic is simplifying its bladder cancer tests, Barts Health NHS Trust is anonymising medical imaging to research illnesses.
The race to stay on top of medical technology continues as a private hospital and an NHS Trust both invest in technology that will enhance patient care.
The London Clinic, Britain’s largest independent charitable hospital, is working with genomic cancer tester Nonacus Clinical Services to deliver a simple urine test for bladder cancer.
Rather than having a camera inserted into the urethra to inspect the bladder visually, the new test is completely non-invasive. It detects somatic mutations in genes found across all grades and stages of bladder cancer via a urine sample.
“Using this test in the early stage of the diagnostic journey has exciting potential to help identify those patients who may have bladder cancer, and to save others from undergoing unnecessary invasive investigative processes,” said Jeannie Rigby, chief executive officer at the charity Action Bladder Cancer.
The test is currently being evaluated by NHS Trusts in the UK and is now featured in the European Association of Urology Guidelines, which provides best-practice clinical guidelines for frontline urologists across Europe.
Anonymise and export
Elsewhere, Barts Health NHS Trust has become the first healthcare provider in the NHS to implement Anonymise and Export from medical imaging IT company Sectra. This will make it easier for researchers to shed light on diseases, tailor treatments and potentially inform the next generation of healthcare AI.
Anonymise and Export has been implemented within the trust’s existing Sectra enterprise imaging software, a system widely used by NHS diagnosticians to analyse patient scans and allows the export of medical images to a secure data environment, with patient identifiers automatically removed.
This removes a previously manually intensive process.
The de-identified imaging data will be integrated into the new Barts Health Data Platform (BHDP), which was formally launched in April.
“We are now able to provide researchers and clinicians with access to health and imaging data at a scale we’ve not offered before. With robust safeguards in place, this development supports more efficient, secure research and marks meaningful progress in advancing medical innovation and understanding of disease,” said Steven Newhouse, deputy chief information officer for the Trust.
