About the study
Children with cerebral palsy need regular hip X-rays — but getting those X-rays read quickly and consistently has some challenges.
Why this matters
Cerebral palsy causes muscle tightness that can gradually pull the hip out of its socket. This can initially happen without any pain, so it can go unnoticed. If it is not caught early, it can lead to severe pain and major surgery.
Regular hip X-rays can spot the problem early - at the point when simple procedures are likely to prevent it getting worse. This is why the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends that most children with CP have routine hip checks as part of their care, through a national programme called the Cerebral Palsy Integrated Pathway (CPIP).
The problem
At the moment, clinicians measure each X-ray by hand. It takes time, the results can vary between different clinicians depending on their experience, and the figures then have to be entered manually into a national database. From here, alerts can be set up to identify hips that may need attention.
Only one in ten eligible children with CP in the UK currently has complete X-ray measurement records within the CPIPs system - largely because of the burden that recording and uploading these measurements place on busy clinical teams.
What we are doing
The HIPPO study is developing software that can measure hip X-rays automatically. It uses machine vision - a type of artificial intelligence - to read the image in seconds, produce a result, and upload it directly to the national database. A clinician checks every result before it is used.
The goal is faster, more consistent monitoring for every child with CP in the UK — wherever they are seen, and whoever is doing the measuring.