New digital scanner helps Sarthe and Maine hospitals refine cancer diagnoses

Two hospitals in Sarthe and Maine can now diagnose cancer more efficiently, thanks to increasing use of digital features including AI.

Staff at the Centre Hospitalier Le Mans (Sarthe) and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Angers (Maine) are now equipped with the P1000, a high-capacity digital pathology slide scanner that allows staff and doctors to analyse larger volumes of medical samples more efficiently. Combined with digital systems and AI tools, this can help speed up the diagnostic process. 

The P1000 can process several hundred tissue or blood samples per day, helping laboratories handle higher volumes more efficiently. Although it does not directly detect cancer itself, according to the hospital it has contributed to a significant increase of 20% in diagnostic capacity. The cancer unit at Le Mans diagnoses several thousand cancer cases each year. 

The scanner is a large machine, roughly around one by two metres, equipped with automated mechanisms that load and move slides into place. It scans each slide at high resolution to create a complete digital image. These images appear on a computer screen, allowing doctors to view, compare, and analyse samples more easily. 

By digitalising the sampling process, the technique opens the door to integration with artificial intelligence tools, Dr Justine Wacquet, a pathologist specialising in the analysis of cells and tissues at Le Mans, told Ouest-France.

AI-tools are widespread across many hospitals across France, assisting in various areas.

Medical and radiology imagery uses AI to detect anomalies in mammographies or locate fractures. It also outlines organs during radiography treatments.

Furthermore, it can assist doctors during operations and absorb administrative paperwork tasks.

The use of AI in medical diagnosis and procedures is an area of debate. 

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and Harvard published a study last October in The New England Journal of Medicine on AI’s reasoning capacities in clinical cases. A medical expert and an AI system were given the same clinical case.

“This man versus machine highlights a stark contrast. Doctors excel in contextual analysis and sampling hypothesis where AI is mesmerisingly fast in crunching and analysing data to generate a list of potential diagnosis,” writes Le Monde in a breakdown analysis of the study.

AI, however, was not able to interconnect every fact given in the clinical case.