A project being led by King’s College London (KCL) has received funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) totalling £100,000 to create a platform to boost artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted healthcare for cancer diagnosis.
The PharosAI project will develop a platform for AI researchers and companies to access cancer-related datasets to train AI in healthcare settings.
One of 12 teams awarded as part of the DSIT’s Research Venture Catalyst Programme, the project will comprise researchers from KCL, Guy’s and St Thomas’s Trust, Bart’s Cancer Institute and Bart’s Health Trust.
The platform will help researchers and companies develop, evaluate and deploy NHS-quality AI for cancer diagnosis, offering AI clinical evaluation, deployment, standards validation services and educational programmes.
According to the project proposal, researchers aim to develop a data refinery sourced from over 50,000 patient samples from King’s Health Partners Cancer Biobank and the Breast Cancer Now Tissue Bank to create bespoke multimodal datasets.
Specifically designed to build and test AI applications, the multimodal dataset will comprise patient-centric information from a variety of sources, covering areas including pathology, radiology, clinical and genomic data, to provide extensive information on a patient’s disease.
In addition, the PharosAI project will also involve leveraging the new KCL Health Partners Digital Health Hub, the Guy’s Cancer Academy and the King’s 20 Accelerator while delivering the next generation of pathologists, biomedical computer scientists, health entrepreneurs and clinicians for the NHS.
Furthermore, the project will advance the UK’s position in multimodal precision medicines and will help to address health inequalities across the nation, explained Professor Anita Grigoriadis, school of cancer and pharmaceutical sciences, KCL.
Dr Gregory Verghese, research associate, cancer bioinformatics, KCL and Breast Cancer Now, Guy’s Hospital, said that PharosAI intends to simplify “the journey to develop and deploy AI applications into the NHS” and will “[provide] the necessary data, tools, education and services to build high-quality, safe and patient-centric AI that will benefit the NHS, clinicians and ultimately revolutionise patient care”.
