
Building AI for Women's Health: How Hertility Combined Bayesian Diagnosis and Scan Automation
Guests Tulsi Patel, Director of Product and Technology, Hertility Lorna Brightmore, Head of Data and AI, Hertility Jack Pickard, Head of Engineering, Hertility In this episode What makes Hertility's data set unique: seven years of linked symptoms, blood tests, and pelvic scans from over a million women How Gyn.AI uses a Bayesian network to give clinicians probability-based diagnoses instead of binary yes/no calls Why showing clinicians the reasoning behind a diagnosis—not just the label—builds trust and speeds up triage Guarding against automation bias with holdout sets and independent, fresh-eyes review Inside the scan automation pipeline: classifying ultrasound images, detecting follicles, and measuring ovarian volume more precisely than manual methods Using an agentic loop to check AI-drafted clinical letters against patient data and catch hallucinations before a human sees them The infrastructure challenge of securely piping DICOM ultrasound images from third-party scan providers into Hertility's systems How Hertility handles PII and PHI: pseudonymization, data minimization, and running models in-house on AWS Bedrock Why treating healthcare regulation as a product requirement from day one makes AI products more scalable, not slower Key Takeaways Probabilistic, transparent AI outputs build more clinician trust than binary classifications. Guardrails against automation bias are as important as the model itself. Data minimization and in-house infrastructure make it possible to build AI responsibly with sensitive health data. Treating regulation as a design constraint from day one makes AI products more defensible and scalable, not slower. Resources & Links Hertility — At-home hormone testing and reproductive health diagnostics for women in the UK and Ireland AWS Bedrock — The platform Hertility uses to run LLMs in-house under its own governance and regulatory controls PyTorch — The foundation for Hertility's in-house image classification and contouring models Chapters 00:00 Meet the Team 00:13 What Hertility Does 01:51 How Customers Access It 04:06 A Unique Women’s Health Dataset 07:03 Mission and Efficiency with AI 10:03 Why Long Assessments Convert 13:52 Before AI Workflows 16:52 Research Publications and Impact 18:48 GynAI Reducing Time to Diagnosis 21:21 Triage and Clinician Support 24:37 Keeping Patient UX the Same 26:12 Bayesian Network and Explainability 30:19 Multiple Diagnoses and Probabilities 32:37 Probabilistic Diagnosis Shift 33:50 Clinician Adoption and Workflow Fit 34:58 Communicating Medical Uncertainty 36:43 Scan Automation Overview 40:30 In House Image Analysis 44:25 DICOM Pipeline Engineering 47:30 Evals and Automation Bias 50:31 LLM Letter Guardrails 56:47 PHI Handling and Regulations 01:00:43 Infrastructure Choices and Wrap Up


















