The government has today revealed the location of five new medical centres that could save lives by using radical advances in AI medical technologies.
The ‘centres of excellence’ will be based in Leeds, Oxford, Coventry, Glasgow and London but will each have partners across “many parts of the UK”.
They will bring together doctors, businesses and academics to develop products using advances in digital technology to improve early diagnosis of disease, including cancer by detecting abnormalities.
It is hoped that the centres will develop more intelligent analysis of medical imaging, which will lead to better clinical decisions for patients and free up more staff time for direct patient care in the NHS.
“The innovation at these new centres will help diagnose disease earlier to give people more options when it comes to their treatment, and make reporting more efficient, freeing up time for our much-admired NHS staff time to spend on direct patient care,” said business secretary Greg Clark.
The new centres will be funded through the government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and will be spearheaded by medical giants including GE Healthcare, Siemens, Philips, Leica, Canon and Roche Diagnostics.
They are expected to be up and running during 2019.
“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,” added Professor Sir Mark Walport, chief executive of UKRI.
“Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionise the speed and accuracy of medical diagnosis.”
Health secretary Matt Hancock said artificial intelligence will play “a crucial role” in the future of the NHS.
“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,” he added.
The centres are: London Medical Imaging and Artificial Intelligence Centre for Value-based Healthcare; Glasgow’s I-CAIRD (Industrial Centre for AI Research in Digital Diagnostics); NCIMI (National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging) in Oxford; The Northern Pathology Imaging Collaborative (NPIC) located in Leeds; and the Pathology image data Lake for Analytics, Knowledge and Education (PathLAKE) in Coventry.