Building AI for Women's Health: How Hertility Combined Bayesian Diagnosis and Scan Automation

How do you build trustworthy AI diagnostic tools in one of medicine's most historically under-researched areas?

In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Tulsi Patel (Director of Product and Technology), Lorna Brightmore (Head of Data and AI), and Jack Pickard (Head of Engineering) at Hertility, a UK and Ireland-based women's health tech company. Hertility combines an in-depth online health assessment with at-home hormone testing and clinician-reviewed reports to help diagnose conditions spanning menstruation to menopause.

Built on seven years of data linking symptoms, blood results, and pelvic ultrasound scans for over a million women, the team walks through two AI products in development: Gyn.AI, a Bayesian network that gives clinicians probability-based diagnoses instead of binary calls, and a scan automation pipeline that classifies ultrasound images, measures follicle counts and ovarian volume, and drafts clinical letters using an agentic loop that checks its own output against patient data before a human ever reviews it.

You'll hear how the team guards against automation bias, builds clinician trust through transparency, minimizes PII before it ever reaches a model, and treats healthcare regulation as a design constraint from day one rather than a last-minute scramble. It's a detailed look at what it takes to bring AI into one of the most sensitive, tightly regulated corners of healthcare.