NHS England is investing £250m to boost the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the health service. Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced a national AI laboratory which will enhance the care of patients and research.
AI is credited with having enormous power to save lives, improve care and ensure doctors have more time to spend with patients. AI algorithms can spot patterns gleaned from vast amounts of data and is has been proven that AI is as good as leading doctors when it comes to recognising skin cancer, lung cancer and dozens of eye conditions from scans.
Such techniques are already being deployed in our research labs. At our dedicated Centre within Queen Mary University of London, Professor Silvia Marino and her team are using AI and mathematical modelling to speed up analysis of huge amounts of data, which is key to their work in getting us closer to a cure.
Prof Marino said: “AI enables us to analyse data about the genetic profiles of a large number of brain tumour tissue samples in a much shorter timescale, and in much more detail, than would have been possible before the development of this technology. AI can also be used to identify patterns in that data that we can then analyse and interpret, based on what we already understand about glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), giving us new insights as to how these tumours develop and behave over time.”
Neurosurgeon Mr Kevin O’Neill and his team are also using AI to see how it can help create more personalised treatments for patients at another of our dedicated Research Centres.
Related reading: