Five new Artificial Intelligence centres are to be established in the UK to help hospitals make scans and biopsy images digital in a bid to cut down manual reporting.
Greg Clark Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced five new Artificial Intelligence centres of excellence for digital pathology and imaging, including radiology, using artificial intelligence (AI) medical advances. Established to assist hospitals make scans and biopsy images digital, the centres have the aim to free up more staff time for direct patient care in the NHS and is part of a bid to find new ways to speed up diagnosis of diseases to improve to outcomes for patients.
Artificial Intelligence centres backed by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund
The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is managed by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and will be based at universities and NHS facilities. The Artificial Intelligence centres are expected to be up and running in 2019.
Health secretary Matt Hancock, said: “Artificial intelligence will play a crucial role in the future of the NHS – and we need to embrace it by introducing systems which can speed up diagnoses, improve patient outcomes, make every pound go further and give clinicians more time with their patients.
“As part of our long-term plan, we will transform the NHS into an ecosystem of enterprise and innovation that allows technology to flourish and evolve.”
The centres, based across the United Kingdom, include:
- London Medical Imaging and Artificial Intelligence Centre for Value-Based Healthcare: this will use AI in medical imaging and associated clinical data for faster and earlier diagnosis and automating expensive and time-consuming manual reporting.
- I-CAIRD (Industrial Centre for AI Research in Digital Diagnostics), Glasgow: this centre will bring together clinicians, health planners, and industry to work with innovative SMEs to answer clinical questions, and to quickly and efficiently solve healthcare challenges.
- NCIMI (National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging), Oxford: will consider the role clinical imaging plays in the delivery of more personalised care and earlier diagnosis to support disease prevention and treatment.
- The Northern Pathology Imaging Collaborative (NPIC), Leeds: will boost the city’s reputation in digital pathology research further by creating a world-leading centre linking up nine industry partners, eight universities and nine NHS trusts.
- The Pathology image data Lake for Analytics, Knowledge and Education (PathLAKE), Coventry: this centre will use NHS pathology data to drive economic growth in health-related AI.
Do the Artificial Intelligence centres have the potential to excel?
Professor Sir Mark Walport, chief executive of UKRI said: “The centres announced today bring together the teams that will develop artificial intelligence tools that can analyse medical images varying from x-rays to microscopic sections from tissue biopsies.
“Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionise the speed and accuracy of medical diagnosis.”
The Artificial Intelligence centres aim to bring together doctors, businesses and academics to develop products using these advances in digital technology to improve early diagnosis of disease, including cancer by detecting abnormalities.
Products created at the new centres will offer more personalised treatment for patients whilst also having the aim to free up doctors to spend more time caring for patients, and investment in large-scale genomics and image analysis will drive new understanding of how complex diseases develop.
