He added that it was hoped the new delivery method, which has been created in partnership with tech company Apian, would offer a better option for cancer patients living on the Isle of Wight, many of whom currently have to travel to the mainland for treatment.

Eye scans from 150,000 National Health Service (NHS) patients in the UK will be used to test commercial artificial intelligence tools that could be rolled out to spot the warning signs of diabetic sight loss. But researchers aim to avoid a repeat of previous NHS data-sharing scandals by ensuring that records are anonymised and that AI tests are only run on servers owned by NHS trusts.

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.