The Challenge

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) performs over 135,000 chest X-rays each year, many essential for urgent clinical decisions. They wanted to adopt an AI chest X-ray tool to accelerate diagnosis and improve patient care.

Supporting responsible AI adoption for chest X-ray diagnosis and ensuring that deployment was robust, safe and efficient, LTHT prioritised a careful, data-driven approach to AI adoption.

Clinicians, navigating new ground with using AI applications, worked to define and generate the data needed to build a clinical safety case and develop confidence in the application.

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Solution

As part of a regional project backed by the NHS AI Diagnostic Fund and delivered through the Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative, LTHT partnered with Newton’s Tree and AI company Annalise.ai to implement their cutting-edge diagnostic AI.

The AI acts as a "second pair of eyes" for clinicians, identifying up to 85 different findings including lung cancer, acute infections, and incorrectly placed tubes, with results delivered in minutes.

Newton’s Tree led the implementation, minimising the need for Trust IT resources, and helping the Trust to evaluate the application in shadow mode before live deployment.

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Implementation

Consultant and resident radiologists at LTHT provided a combination of prospective and retrospective datas to evaluate the AI using Newton’s Tree’s sandbox environment.

Newton’s Tree set up the workflow and enabled clinicians to review and test AI outputs on a case by case basis using AI Review.

This controlled evaluation was key to building clinical confidence, informing the Trust’s clinical safety case and SOPs, and ensuring the AI aligned with clinical judgment before live deployment.

The clinical evaluation, from data curation to analysing outputs took was completed within 1 week.

Faster deployment

With Newton’s Tree, LTHT was able to commit to a deployment date, completing both evaluation and deployment within 12 weeks.

Clinical confidence

Busy frontline staff were able to participate in a rapid evaluation with minimal training contributing to the clinical safety case and internal standard operating procedures while building confidence in the application.

Supporting operational efficiency

By managing the integration and workflow setup, Newton’s Tree worked in close partnership with the Trust’s IT to successfully deploy the software, allowing it to be safely adopted while supporting the Trust’s operational efficiencies.

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