Using AI to detect cancer from patient data securely

Artificial intelligence (AI) can analyse large amounts of data, such as images or trial results, and can identify patterns often undetectable by humans, making it highly valuable in speeding up disease detection, diagnosis and treatment. However, using the technology in medical settings is controversial because of the risk of accidental data release and many systems are owned and controlled by private companies, giving them access to confidential patient data -- and the responsibility for protecting it. The researchers set out to discover whether a form of AI, called swarm learning, could be used to help computers predict cancer in medical images of patient tissue samples, without releasing the data from hospitals. Swarm learning trains AI algorithms to detect patterns in data in a local hospital or university, such as genetic changes within images of human tissue. The swarm learning system then sends this newly trained algorithm -- but importantly no local data or patient information -- to a central computer.