AI breast cancer screening project wins government funding for NHS trial

UK researchers have secured government funding to study the use of artificial intelligence for breast cancer screening in NHS hospitals. The work builds on previous research which showed that artificial intelligence could be as effective as human radiologists in spotting breast cancer from X-ray images. Backed by funding through the Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award, the next stages of the project aim to further assess the feasibility of the AI system to see how the technology could be integrated into the national screening programme in the future to support clinicians. The partnership, which includes Imperial College London, Google Health, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, St George's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust builds on previous work, in which the researchers trained the algorithm on depersonalised patient data and mammograms from patients in the UK and US. The findings, published in Nature in January 2020, showed the AI system was able to correctly identify cancers from the images with a similar degree of accuracy to expert radiologists, and demonstrated potential to assist clinical staff in practice.