Five new centres for healthcare AI set to open across the UK

The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is providing £50m government funding to facilitate the creation of five new healthcare AI centres. They are scheduled for 2019 and will be based at universities and NHS facilities in London, Oxford, Coventry, Leeds and Glasgow, where academic and industry experts will work in collaboration with medical companies including Roche Diagnostics, Canon, GE Healthcare, Siemens, Philips and Leica on imaging, diagnostics and pathology AI research. The products developed will provide more personalised treatment for patients while freeing up doctors’ time. This investment in genomics and image analysis is intended to improve our comprehension around how complex diseases develop, to facilitate patients getting the right treatment at the earliest opportunity.
Health secretary Matt Hancock said: “Artificial intelligence will play a crucial role in the future of the NHS – and we need to embrace it by introducing systems which can speed up diagnoses, improve patient outcomes, make every pound go further and give clinicians more time with their patients.”
UKRI chief executive Professor Sir Mark Walport, said: “Early diagnosis of illness can greatly increase the chances of successful treatment and save lives. The centres announced today bring together the teams that will develop artificial intelligence tools that can analyse medical images varying from x-rays to microscopic sections from tissue biopsies. Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionise the speed and accuracy of medical diagnosis.”