Case studies

Using AI to improve back office efficiency in the NHS

11 February 2022: The following fictional patient story features AI products that have won funding and support from the AI in Health and Care Award. The AI Award is helping to trial and evaluate 86 AI technologies that focus on the most pressing issues for health and care, as laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan.

Sharing AI skills and experience through deep dive workshops with University Hospital Southampton

30 March 2022: The Digital team at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) approached us with a request to explore the ethical and safety considerations of applying AI in their work.

Artificial Intelligence: How to get it right

This summary gives an overview of the AI challenges and opportunities covered in the NHS AI Lab 2019 Report - Artificial intelligence: how to get it right which looks at data-driven technologies in the health and care system, from the local research environment to international frameworks in development.

Cogstack

24 August 2020: Cogstack is an open source real-time data warehousing tool meeting the need for an efficient way of coding that improves financial and operational efficiencies for NHS providers.

Precision medicine

24 August 2020: Precision medicine considers variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle to decide disease treatment and prevention, more accurately predicting which treatment and prevention strategies will work best for a particular patient. AI can address this by leveraging deep learning approaches to overcome the obstacles inherent in large data sets and unstructured data. In clinical settings, AI can assist clinicians to work more efficiently and make more accurate diagnoses improving the productivity of healthcare workers.

EMRAD

24 August 2020: Emrad is a partnership of seven NHS trusts (see below) spread over 11 hospitals, covering more than five million patients, to create a new, common digital radiology system. In 2018, EMRAD formed a partnership with two UK-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies: Faculty and Kheiron Medical Technologies , to help develop, test and ultimately deploy AI tools in the breast cancer screening programme in the East Midlands.

Kortical

24 August 2020: Kortical is building artificial intelligence models to predict demand and supply levels, for example in different blood types, allowing for patient needs to be met more precisely.

Healthy.io: Smartphone albuminuria urine self-testing

7 April 2021: Patients with diabetes and high blood pressure are benefiting from pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) that turns a smartphone camera into a clinical-grade tool to detect early kidney disease.

Mia mammography intelligent assessment

7 April 2021: Applying deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) to breast cancer screening. Mia™, or mammography intelligent assessment, is designed to analyse standard mammograms for breast cancer screening. It is the first product developed by a UK company, Kheiron Medical, to receive the CE mark for deep learning software in radiology.

Working with a Trusted Research Environment

The NHS AI Lab Skunkworks team and NHS England’s Health Inequalities and Evaluation Analytics Team used a Trusted Research Environment (TRE)called OpenSAFELY, an open-source software platform for analysis of electronic health care records data for COVID-19 related research.

Identifying and quantifying Parkinson’s Disease using AI on brain slices

AI case study which reviews developing an approach to enhance the identification of biomarkers which are indicative of Parkinson’s Disease, and explore whether automated identification of Parkinson’s Disease in these slices is possible.

Examining whether recruitment data can, and should, be used to train AI models for shortlisting interview candidates

6 April 2023: Can we identify where bias has potential to occur when using machine learning for shortlisting interview candidates as part of the NHS England recruitment process? How does this manifest, and how can it be mitigated?

Using deep learning to detect adrenal lesions in CT scans

Traditionally, the detection of adrenal lesions on CT scans relies on manual analysis by radiologists, which can be time-consuming and unsystematic. Can applying AI and deep learning augment the detection of adrenal incidentalomas in patients’ CT scans?

AI in imaging: resource collection

This resource collection provides information about and learnings from the National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID).

Using AI to identify tissue growth from CT scans

17 November 2021: George Eliot Hospital approached the NHS AI Lab Skunkworks team with an idea to use AI to speed up the analysis of computerised tomography (CT) scans.

Algorithmic impact assessment: a case study in healthcare

This report sets out the first-known detailed proposal for the use of an algorithmic impact assessment for data access in a healthcare context

Exploring how to create mock patient data (synthetic data) from real patient data

The NHS AI Lab Skunkworks team has been releasing open-source code from their artificial intelligence (AI) projects since 2021. One of the challenges faced with releasing code is that without suitable test data it is not possible to properly demonstrate AI tools, preventing users without data access from being able to see the tool in action.

Using AI to find optimal placement schedules for nursing students

Can a tool or approach be developed which automatically generates student nurse placement schedules that adhere to the requirements and constraints of the different stakeholders, while additionally providing a more diverse range of placements for the students?

Data Lens: a fast-access data search in multiple languages

25 March 2021: A pilot project for the NHS AI Lab Skunkworks team, Data Lens brings together information about multiple databases, providing a fast-access search in multiple languages.