Consortium-led NHS Projects to Improve UK Cancer Care

Two new projects, launched with Investment through United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) as part of the Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and involving major cross-sector collaborations with the health services, academia and industry partners are being led by Philips, a global health technology leader and the NHS. The initiative will fully digitise a number of NHS pathology laboratories, accelerating the development of novel artificial intelligence (AI) software to support cancer diagnostics: a key strategic goal of the programme.

“Philips has been fully invested in the Government’s Life Sciences Industry Strategy from the outset and now has two opportunities to build strong partnerships that will drive improved patient care in the UK for years to come,” comments Neil Mesher, CEO for Philips UKI. “Philips sees this as not only an opportunity to invest in improved and earlier diagnostics for patients via AI in pathology services but also as a new day for collaborative, cross-partner working that will ensure a future-proofed, world-class NHS. We are honoured to be part of what will undoubtedly be an exciting three years in digital diagnostics and personalised medicine discovery.”

Philips will be principle partner in Project PathLAKE (Pathology image data Lake for Education, Analytics and Discovery) will create a secure data-lake of tens of thousands of professionally annotated images for building deep learning algorithms that can automatically detect cancer.

Philips is also investing AI tools, software and expertise in Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital as part of project iCAIRD, (Industrial Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research in Digital Diagnostics), a resource where AI researchers can assess digital diagnostics, pathology and radiology data within existing national initiatives by fast-tracking the digitisation of the comprehensive Scottish NHS pathology data. This will create one of the largest fully digitised pathology laboratories in Europe, establishing a national pathology image archive as an open-standard, accessible and scalable resource. available to support research and innovation in cancer across the UK. Philips will provide AI tools, software and expertise to accelerate development of deep learning and drive innovation, helping to facilitate earlier and more definitive diagnosis of gynaecological cancers.

Both projects are three-years in duration and initial activities began in December 2018.