A new technology brought in at the Rwanda Military Hospital will make cancer diagnosis faster and easier, medics have said. The new tech enables the medics to carry out pathology at a distance using telecommunication technology to facilitate the transfer of image-rich pathology data between distant locations for the purposes of diagnosis, education, and research. The system named "OMNYX tm VL4” consists of an indoor scanner, cameras, a microscope, and computers. It scans and displays the patient’s results on a computer screen and the images of them can be shared online with other medics within RMH itself, other hospitals in the country or in the different parts of the world for medics to have a look and advise their counterparts on the nature of illness and how it can be handled. "Testing and treating cancer is a big challenge globally, and here in Rwanda, we have a specific challenge of not having many specialised doctors in both testing and treatment of the disease. "So, this new system comes as a way of helping us to test and diagnose cancer faster as we communicate among us so that we can be able to administer immediate treatment that will give the patients more opportunities to recover,” said Lt. Colonel Fabien Ntaganda, the head of laboratory services at RMH. RMH has already established a partnership with the American Society of Clinical Pathologists based in Boston USA, where fifteen American doctors volunteered to work with the hospital, receiving the images and responding in 24 hours.

It is capable of testing all types of cancers both in children and adults, and the doctors will be able to provide the diagnosis and a therapeutic decision within five days as opposed to the two weeks it used to take them before.