TL;DR
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has run a three-month trial of AI-guided handheld ultrasound for suspected blood clots. Most patients got an answer inside half an hour of the scan starting, four in five went home after one visit, and the average wait for those needing further tests roughly halved.
What was measured
Clinicians completed 120 examinations and ruled out deep vein thrombosis in 97 of them. Typical time from beginning a scan to a clinical decision came in under 30 minutes, and 80% of patients were discharged following that first scan. Fewer than one in five needed a follow-up departmental ultrasound afterwards.
For patients who did require more investigation, average time from first presentation to diagnosis dropped from 19 hours to nine — meaning anyone found to have a clot could be told the same day. Within four weeks of the pathway going live, the share of patients getting a scan report inside the four-hour window NICE recommends went from 18% to 51%.
How it works
The technology comes from ThinkSono, headquartered in London. It pairs a handheld ultrasound probe with real-time AI that walks the clinician through the scan, while a sonographer or radiologist reviews the images remotely. The point is that a general clinician can capture usable images at the first appointment, rather than the patient returning for a specialist-led scan.
DVT affects roughly one adult in every thousand each year and can lead to pulmonary embolism. Diagnosis has conventionally depended on specialist sonographers, which is precisely the bottleneck. CW+, the trust’s charity, funded the work through its joint innovation programme.
Looking forward
The trust is now looking at wider use. Consultant Jonathan Downing, who leads same-day emergency care there, said patients previously waited hours and sometimes overnight for imaging access.
This is the third distinct NHS AI diagnostic deployment Resultsense has covered in three days, after chest X-ray triage in East Grinstead and a cleared physiotherapy pathway. Different trusts, different vendors, different pathways — and in each case the AI handles capture or triage while a qualified human signs off. That configuration is quietly becoming the British default, and it is the one with outcome data behind it.