Redesigning an AI tool to transform coronary diagnosis

Rapid speed to market required immediate product immersion. Augmenting Artrya’s existing team and technical capabilities, we placed ourselves within their world to understand the challenges and complexities to provide value on day one. With stakeholders in Australia, North America, and Europe, we ‘followed the sun’ – working across time zones to accelerate progress.

A strategic approach centered around user insights helped us to hone in on Artrya Salix’s value to physicians. Insights gleaned from cardiologists and radiologists unlocked design opportunities and informed our decisions.

Thanks to this close collaboration, we gained a deep understanding of real-life workflows that defined our feature sets and user stories, ensuring we optimized our designs for the realities physicians face at the frontline of cardiac diagnosis. Rapidly responding to physician feedback during each sprint, we quickly iterated, making continuous improvements to the user experience.

During our research, we discovered there is a high level of visual impairment in the radiologist community, with color blindness being common among physicians. As color is used to identify disease in the vessels, it was imperative to make all colors accessible across the experience. Red-green color blindness is the most common, so we had to rethink the two colors that typically denote failure and success.



We reworked the palette to pink, orange, yellow, and gray and used blue sparingly in areas of interactions and active windows. It was essential to remove color clutter, increase legibility and visibility, and eliminate drop shadows so that clinicians could focus on areas of disease and stenosis. Our UI ensured diagnosis panels, the heart model, and scans have prominence. Inspired by the phosphorescence of deep ocean creatures, the colors within the redesigned 3D model represented disease and lesions.

Physicians told us that in addition to navigating their way around the heart, they would benefit from analyzing individual vessels in forensic detail. To account for this feedback, we designed view switchers, allowing Physicians to quickly drag and grab scans and compare disease progression.

We also considered how to give physicians a way to layer their expertise onto the tool's AI-powered information so they could better determine the right course of action. We redesigned the interface so physicians can override AI-generated reports and input manually at any time or revert to AI assessments. And we brought other helpful action-oriented features into the solution, like synced CT scans, expanded reports, and the ability to assign reviewers and send reminders.

We built efficiency in from the start, reducing unnecessary clicks to allow physicians to access dropdown reports with pre-populated fields. With up to five clinicians needing to review every report, create actions, and make approvals, Artrya Salix required a robust activity timeline that ensured the physician could be in complete control.

Since its launch, Artrya Salix has gained approvals in key regions worldwide—a global expansion of its groundbreaking medical technology that can help save billions in testing costs, change the standard of care, and ultimately save lives. 
With the product in-market, we are now providing ongoing engineering support, designing the Artrya Salix website, and continuing to work as an agile extension of the Artrya team.