Public Funding for Seeai LTD.

This project is led by Saile Villegas, director and co-founder of Seeai LTD, a Med-tech company based in Leeds that aims to reduce health inequalities and deliver the best medical care in every corner of the world. Saile Villegas was raised by a single mother, in a male-dominated town in Mexico, where cartels and violence are around the corner. Pursuing a career in STEM as a woman was beyond belief. Despite that, she showed an incredible drive to move to the UK and pursue her passion for computer science. Now she leads a multidisciplinary team of experts, from radiologists to computer science professors, to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can detect fractures as well as expert radiologists, with the NHS. Every year 152,000 fracture misdiagnosis occur in the UK. Usually, patients with suspected fractures attend the Accident and Emergency (A&E) department and receive an x-ray examination. These x-rays are often reviewed by healthcare professionals without radiological expertise, due to the shortage of radiologists, resulting in a high error rate of up to 30% in this high-pressure environment. Saile Villegas has led a collaboration with NHS Grampian for two years to develop an AI-supported early fracture diagnosis system, named Fraxpert, to assist clinicians in confidently identifying subtle (hard to see) fractures. Seeai has completed a working prototype and the internal validation of the system showed detection performance to the level of expert radiologists. This project will take Fraxpert from a working prototype to a regulated product. Seeai will visit various hospitals (small-large, rural-urban) and research the optimal clinical pathway to integrate the AI. This investigation will also allow Seeai to identify potential customers. The support from the award will allow Fraxpert to effectively transition from R&D into a product that can be commercialised. Successful implementation of Fraxpert in hospitals will help healthcare providers cope with the shortage of radiologists and improve patient outcomes. This award will also provide an opportunity for Saile Villegas to equip herself with the business strategy skills required to successfully commercialise her innovation. In addition, the network of mentoring offered by the programme will allow her to learn from other women in innovation to improve her capabilities as a leader in innovation.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many trainees and students in radiology are reporting disruption to their education. Social distancing measures and travelling restrictions have limited the traditional trainee-faculty member workstation teaching, and face-to-face lectures have been replaced by live conferences, class recordings, or cancelled altogether. Radiology students have recognised that while various digital resources provide theoretical knowledge, alternatives to practice-based training are limited. To solve the problem, we propose an AI-supported high-fidelity virtual training environment for reporting x-rays. The training system uses an interface of a real diagnostic environment and trainees can report x-ray images with an English free text, emulating the real reporting practice. The AI algorithm interprets the raw report and trainees receive instant feedback. As the system is web-based, it can reach trainees and students whose education has been affected by the global pandemic. Furthermore, it can be of value to educational institutions by utilising the training system for practice-based examinations. Usually, assessors individually review and provide feedback to student's reports. Our system allows automated grading and real-time feedback simultaneously to multiple students. We are a team of domain experts formed of technologists and doctors, focused on developing intelligent solutions to support radiologists. The pandemic has widely disrupted lives, including that of radiology trainees, and forcing changes to how we deliver education. As the end to this pandemic is still unclear, we envision to create a sustainable solution that contributes to the future of radiology education and provide an ever-expanding content to support trainees and students in their life-long learning journey. Extension for Impact funding allows us to expand our support from radiology trainees to radiographers, and other medical professionals. The UK is facing a shortage of radiologists and the COVID-19 pandemic is causing a major strain on the hospital’s already limited reporting capacity. To better manage the demand for radiology services, we need more radiographers to be qualified to report imaging studies. We will develop assessment tools that use standardized packages of cases with benchmark scores across different medical professionals to evaluate the accuracy of image reading. This will help hospitals to ensure reporting quality and confidently integrate radiographers in the reporting process. Moreover, improving the diagnostic skills of other medical professionals required to interpret medical images, such as emergency department doctors, junior doctors, and nurses, can help better manage the increasing demand. Patients will be triaged effectively and correct treatment will be provided at the initial point of consultation. With our platform, hospitals can effectively upskill the current and coming workforce. It can help hospitals increase the capability to better manage the demand and build a resilient healthcare system for the future.