This edition of Digital Health News industry round-up includes projects focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), an app to tackle health inequalities and a project to use primary care data to help eradicate hepatitis C. The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and the Francis Crick Institute are working with AI start-up Owkin to gain a better understanding of how kidney cancers evolve to help improve treatment for the disease. By studying the evolutionary features of a tumour and understanding how it has evolved through a series of genetic changes over time, scientists hope to help doctors predict a patient's outcome, meaning they can tailor treatment to individuals to improve health outcomes. Dr Samra Turajlic, group leader at the Francis Crick Institute and consultant medical oncologist at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said: "We know that the outcomes of any individual patient with kidney cancer are determined by the distinct way their tumour evolves. We want to be able to predict the next step in a tumour's evolutionary trajectory and better tailor treatments that can effectively tackle a patient's cancer. "New technologies and tools are critical in helping us achieve this at a scale and speed that is required in clinical practice, and at a cost that will make these measurements implementable in most healthcare systems." It hopes that it will be able to draw links between the histological characteristics of a tumour with patient outcomes. This will also support the move to precision medicine. The project will use rapid and low-cost AI on digital pathology, helping the day-to-day management of patients in a cost-effective way. Thomas Clozel, co-founder and CEO of Owkin, said: "By using AI to improve our fundamental understanding of cancer tumours, we aim to enable doctors to move towards a precision medicine approach to treatment.

NHSX' NHS AI Lab and the Health Foundation have today awarded £1.4m to four projects to address racial and ethnic health inequalities using artificial intelligence (AI). The winning projects range from using AI to investigate disparities in maternal health outcomes to developing standards and guidance to ensure that datasets for training and testing AI systems are inclusive and generalisable. The NHS AI Lab introduced the AI Ethics Initiative to support research and practical interventions that complement existing efforts to validate, evaluate and regulate AI-driven technologies in health and care, with a focus on countering health inequalities. Today's announcement is the result of the Initiative's partnership with The Health Foundation on a research competition, enabled by NIHR, to understand and enable opportunities to use AI to address inequalities and to optimise datasets and improve AI development, testing and deployment. 'As we strive to ensure NHS patients are amongst the first in the world to benefit from leading AI, we also have a responsibility to ensure those technologies don't exacerbate existing health inequalities.