Jenny Fitzgerald speaking at the DisrupTech Summit 2024. Image: Shane O’Neill/Coalesce
While AI can be assistive technology to an under-resourced pathology sector, Ireland is falling behind when it comes to applying these innovations.
There are a lot of concerns around automation and AI and how much of a threat to jobs it could be. There’s no doubt that we’ve already seen stories of companies pivoting to AI, which can have a knock-on effect for jobs elsewhere in the business. But this should not distract from the tangible ways this technology can alleviate the pressures in other industries, such as healthcare, and even lead to better results.
For example, CeADAR, Ireland’s Research Centre for Applied AI, has joined a European project that aims to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease in a faster, cheaper and more reliable way. And University of Limerick researcher Dr Alison O’Connor believes explainable AI could help streamline healthcare.
Further afield, researchers at MIT and McMaster University used an AI algorithm to identify a new antibiotic last year that can kill a type of bacteria responsible for many drug-resistant infections.
As technology becomes more embedded in society, patients are starting to expect a certain level of digitisation in their healthcare. In fact, an EY survey carried out last year suggested that people are ready for their data to be used and shared in the right way to maximise health outcomes.
But Ireland is trudging behind in the health digitisation field, with a study from the European Commission showing it to be the only EU country not to offer patients the option to view their health data online through a portal.
This problem became even more apparent to me when I sat down with Jenny Fitzgerald, the chief experience officer at Dublin-based pathology start-up Deciphex.
Founded in 2017, Deciphex has developed a digital and fully remote expert pathology service that aims to eliminate the need for physical samples to be transported miles for diagnoses, reducing wait times.
In 2023, the company raised €3.9m in funding and was later crowned Irish medtech company of the year by the Irish Medtech Association. In April 2024, it announced a partnership with Swiss pharma giant Novartis to develop AI tools for drug discovery and development.
The start-up has also developed a digital pathology workflow and integrated AI platform for research pathology. The company has received support from the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF).
A diagnostic support tool
Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com at Enterprise Ireland’s DisrupTech Summit 2024, Fitzgerald explained how the company started off in the area of drug delivery before moving into clinical diagnostics.
“We digitise all of our samples, we digitise all the slides. We do this quite well. It’s our bread and butter. We’ve really automated the whole process, and we’ve allowed for automatic filtering and screening. And then on top of that, we’ve enhanced all of this process by adding in AI to detect any abnormalities in the sample,” she said.
“I think it was about 2020, and it was on the back of the DTIF programme, actually, that we expanded into the clinical arena. So, we decided to arrange our software so that it was more suited to clinical diagnostics.”
The aim is to provide a network of pathologists who are all digitally enabled, so they can sit at home on their laptops and assess complex cases.
“If you think of low- or middle-income countries, who, in the middle of nowhere, would not have access to, say, a head and neck specialist, whereas we have all of these at the touch of a button, at the end of a computer, and we’re able to give complex analysis and consultations on these cases.”
Speeding up diagnostics
Deciphex is now able to provide diagnostic tools to the UK’s NHS as well as Canada and the US, having done about 12,000 cases in the last month with a turnaround time of about 1.8 days, which Fitzgerald said is attributable to the platform’s underlying AI-driven enhancement, but said it is a diagnostic support tool and is not replacing pathologists.
With support from DTIF, Deciphex worked with the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin to anonymise 30,000 colorectal patient samples and then develop AI models based off of these samples.
These models could then screen out normal samples and identify very early-stage diseases. This is then fed into Deciphex’s product in the back-end but is not visible to the pathologist until they make their own diagnosis – it only throws up a flag when there’s a discrepancy. “It’s a second pair of eyes, and allows that extra level of scrutiny to be added.”
Fitzgerald said the company is expanding beyond gastrointestinal samples and is now in the final stages of validating its dermatology and gynaecology samples.
Ireland’s ‘archaic’ health system
While the samples at the Mater Hospital are promising, I asked Fitzgerald why Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) as a whole wasn’t mentioned alongside health systems in Canada and the UK as adopters.
“To be honest, it’s one of the slower adopters of digital across the board. It’s massively archaic in the way that it’s set up,” she said.
“We have taken in some Irish cases, but very, very small volumes, and there’s a lot of red tape to get through. And really, we have to have change at a governmental level.”
Fitzgerald said there are several players in the health-tech system that could massively transform healthcare, particularly when the system is over-burdened and under-resourced.
“I don’t want to disparage the Irish set-up, but it really is unfortunate for, even friends and family, that people are waiting on diagnosis,” she said.
“We’re making inroads, but it’s very, very slow. Whereas we’ve been quite successful in the UK and Canada, we’re getting a good bit of pick-up in the US as well. So, we have a lot of countries who are easily adopting it, but it’s that reluctance to change, it really has to be done at the infrastructure level, the governmental level, somebody has to lobby for that change to happen.”
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