
The announcement, from the UK Department of Health and Social Care, said that the new National Artificial Intelligence Lab will “bring together the industry’s best academics, specialists and technology companies to work on some of the biggest challenges in health and care, including earlier cancer detection, new dementia treatments and more personalised care.”
The idea that AI could help in healthcare is not new.
Back in 2017, British startup Babylon Health said it was looking to create the perfect doctor through the use of machine learning.
The AI Lab for the NHS comes after AI is already being developed in some hospitals, where it has apparently successfully predicted cancer survival rates and cut the number of missed appointments.
Well it is envisaged for example that the AI Lab’s work could improve cancer screening by speeding up the results of tests, including mammograms, brain scans, eye scans and heart monitoring.
It could also use predictive models to better estimate future needs of beds, drugs, devices or surgeries; identify which patients could be more easily treated in the community; identify patients most at risk of diseases such as heart disease or dementia; and it could be used to build systems to detect people at risk of post-operative complications, infections or requiring follow-up from clinicians.