AI is to be trialled at ‘unprecedented scale’ across NHS screening services, the UK Government has announced, in a bid to boost early diagnosis and support the shift of care from analogue to digital.

Under the new plans, millions of patients could receive quicker diagnoses and treatment thanks to a new NHS-wide cloud, which can hold multiple AI tools in a single environment, all with secure connections to NHS trusts in England.

The AI screening platform, dubbed AIR-SP, is backed by nearly £6 million in Government funding and built by NHS England, with the aim of dramatically cutting down the time and costs associated with rolling out AI research studies. 

The system has been designed to allow health trusts to join AI screening trials, as well as offer NHS staff access to AI tools to help better analyse images and pinpoint abnormalities, including possible signs of cancer.

The Government said that, currently, the NHS lacks the digital tools to deploy AI in screening quickly, safely, and at scale, with 90% of AI tools stuck in pilot phases due to over-reliance on temporary IT setups across individual trusts.

The system means that, even if a tool is deemed effective by one trust, every other trust in NHS England must start the process of testing the tool from scratch and set up their own databases to access images generated by AI.

“In order to unlock the potential of AI in healthcare, we need digital infrastructure that enables researchers to rigorously evaluate these tools in real-world NHS settings, at speed and scale,” said Professor Lucy Chappell, chief scientific adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care.

“This unified AI Research Screening Platform will help us to understand how AI can safely and effectively improve patient care, while speeding up the time it takes to set up AI research studies and reducing costs.”

Current research studies involving multiple trusts rely on fragmented IT systems, costing up to £3.5 million per study to allow for AI access to images. It’s hoped that a unified platform will streamline this process, cutting costs by £2-3 million for every multi-site study.

According to the Government, the platform also means futuristic tools could be tested and trialled at the same time, in any trust across the health service, with a view to rolling them out to the NHS frontline if they prove effective.

Still in the early stages, the new platform will take approximately two years to build, with plans for first use being to support nearly 700,000 women across the country taking part in a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)-funded trial, identifying changes in breast tissue that show possible signs of cancer.

Recommended reading

• AI Cancer Tools Might Be ‘Deskilling’ Doctors
• UK Gov Announces New £21M Fund to Roll Out AI Across NHS
• Cancer Innovation Challenge Boosts Scotland’s Cancer Care

“Currently, 11,500 tragically die from breast cancer each year in the UK. But breast screening is a key tool for detecting breast cancer early, and critically, the sooner it’s diagnosed, the more likely it is that treatment will be successful,” said Simon Vincent, chief scientific officer at Breast Cancer Now.

“We therefore welcome the government’s investment in the new artificial intelligence screening platform being built by NHS England. 

“We hope that the introduction of this single shared system will make it both quicker and easier for trusts across the UK to test AI tools that could hold the potential to improve early detection and make the breast screening programme even more effective.”