A collaboration between the Artificial Intelligence Centre for Value-Based Healthcare, King’s College London, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ National Health Service Foundation Trusts aimed at accelerating the adoption and deployment of radiology AI has partnered with Deepc to provide access to six NHS trusts. 

WHY IT MATTERS

Approximately 133,000 scans are produced every day in the UK, but the NHS faces a 29% shortfall of clinical radiologists to analyze those images, according to an announcement from Deepc, an AI operating system vendor.

Delays directly affect patient outcomes, including longer hospital stays and an increased risk of severe complications.

Also, while radiology AI has long been used to increase the number of scans health systems can analyze as well as improve the accuracy of the diagnosis, few NHS patients have benefited because deploying radiology AI in clinical settings has been too expensive and technically complex – particularly with legacy IT systems, according to the company.

Deepc said in an announcement Thursday that it will immediately provide access to six initial NHS sites and provide backlogged radiology departments with access to more than 75 regulatory-approved AI tools.

The first NHS trusts to deploy DeepcOS will be Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust and East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust.

The AI4VBH aims to incubate the development of AI technology within the national health system to adopt them safely, according to Sebastien Ourselin, the center's director. 

"Our partnership with Deepc will begin by helping six NHS trusts access more than 75 clinically proven AI tools – but that is only the beginning," he said. 

The company said that through a single integration that covers data privacy, security, regulatory, procurement, integration, deployment and operations, health systems can rapidly deploy radiology AI and help reduce wait times for patients, help clinicians achieve faster diagnoses and help relieve the pressure on the NHS' radiology departments.

The current partnership will extend to 10 trusts, Deepc said.

Last month, AI4VBH was awarded £1.8 million of NHS England funding for a partnership with the London Secure Data Environment, a citywide network, for a two-year AI collaboration. 

THE LARGER TREND

In 2021, the UK government invested £36 million to boost AI research for NHS projects to improve the quality of care and enhance the speed of diagnoses for conditions such as lung cancer. Then two years ago, the NHS researchers announced that they used COVID-19 chest imaging data to assess the accuracy of health and care algorithms. 

They created a blueprint for AI model testing in order to pave the way for safer AI adoption in UK healthcare. Using the model, NHS also rolled out an AI tool that they said can detect heart disease in 20 seconds. 

Dr. Sonya Babu-Narayan, associate medical director of the British Heart Foundation, called it a "huge advance for doctors and patients" and said it revolutionized heart MRI image analysis. 

She was the associate medical director of Barts Heart Centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which was one of three hospitals to pilot test the technology before it was made available across the NHS.

"The pandemic has resulted in a backlog of hundreds of thousands of people waiting for vital heart scans, treatment and care," she told Healthcare IT News.

"Despite the delay in cardiac care, whilst people remain on waiting lists, they risk avoidable disability and death. That’s why it’s heartening to see innovations like this, which together could help fast-track heart diagnoses and ease workload so that in future we can give more NHS heart patients the best possible care much sooner."

ON THE RECORD

"Working together, we can make the NHS a true leader in the safe and effective use of AI, ultimately delivering benefits to our patients," Ourselin said.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.