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UK Research and Innovation, Cancer Research UK and industry are investing more than £11 million in an Oxford-led artificial intelligence (AI) research programme to improve the diagnosis of lung cancer and other thoracic diseases.

Professor Fergus Gleeson at the University of Oxford will lead on a programme of research focusing on accelerating pathways for the earlier diagnosis of lung cancer. Lung cancer is the biggest cause of cancer death in the UK and worldwide, with £307 million/year cost to the NHS in England. To address this clinical problem, NHS England is launching a £70 million lung cancer screening pilot programme at 10 sites*.

To improve patient care beyond the current screening guidelines, a team of academics from Oxford University, Nottingham University, and Imperial College London; NHS clinicians from Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, the Royal Marsden Hospital, the Royal Brompton Hospital, and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; and the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation will join forces with three leading industrial partners (Roche Diagnostics, GE Healthcare, Optellum).

Working with the NHS England Lung Health Check programme, clinical, imaging and molecular data will be combined for the first time using AI algorithms with the aim of more accurately and quickly diagnosing and characterising lung cancer with fewer invasive clinical procedures. Algorithms will also be developed to better evaluate risks from comorbidities such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). In addition, this programme will link to data from primary care to better assess risk in the general population to refine the right at-risk individuals to be selected for screening. It is hoped that this research will define a new set of standards for lung cancer screening to increase the number of lung cancers diagnosed at an earlier stage, when treatment is more likely to be successful.

In the Big Data Institute the work will be led by professors Jens Rittscher and Jim Davies. Jens will focus on integrating histology and pathology, whereas Jim will focus on data engineering, data quality and data integration.

This programme builds on the National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging (NCIMI) at the Big Data Institute in Oxford, one of five UK AI Centres of Excellence. The funding, delivered through UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI’s) Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, is part of over £13m government investment in ‘data to early diagnosis and precision medicine’ for the research, development and evaluation of integrated diagnostic solutions. UKRI is also partnering with Cancer Research UK, which is making up to a £3m contribution to the cancer-focused projects. The Oxford-led project is one of six awarded from this competition.