Central Maine Medical Center is launching new technology to help diagnose diseases faster

New technology at Central Maine Medical Center will help doctors diagnose patients faster.

Until now, pathologists, who study tissue samples to diagnose diseases such as cancer, have used physical tissue samples on glass slides. But that means when a patient needs a specialist or a second opinion, those slides have to be mailed to the new doctor.

To speed up that process, Central Maine Medical Center is working with Spectrum Healthcare Partners to provide a service that will digitize the samples, making them much faster to send, said Dr. Bilal Ahmad.

“But what we can do is by digitizing it, is get those few cases to the right people who are best suited to make that diagnosis,” he said. “We’re able to do it to some extent now because we’re able to ship around the glass slides, but once it’s digital, it’s instantly available, and so we remove a lot of the barriers.”

And Ahmad said pathologists will use AI tools to analyze samples, helping to identify disease.

Central Maine Medical Center is the first hospital in the state to use this technology and one of the first in the country. But Spectrum plans to expand the service to other hospitals in the state, Ahmad said.

“So with this technology, we can release all these slides from just the locals here and have experts from Boston or California or Texas review the cases for us on the fly,” he said.

This service should make diagnosing diseases, including cancers, even faster, Ahmad said. It is especially important now because there is a shortage of pathologists in Maine and the state has seen an increase in cancer diagnoses.