NHS England to Trial AI, Robotic Tools For Lung Cancer Diagnosis

The National Health Service (NHS) England will trial a combination of AI and robot-assisted care to speed up the detection and diagnosis of lung cancer, the UK’s most lethal form of the disease.

The trial comes at the same time as the health service pledges to offer all smokers and ex-smokers the chance to be screened for lung cancer by 2030.

That expansion will lead to an estimated 50,000 lung cancers being diagnosed by 2035, of which 23,000 will be at early stage, which could save thousands of lives, it said.

The disease is a particular focus of the government’s forthcoming national cancer plan for England because it is Britain’s biggest cancer killer, reflecting historically high smoking rates. It claims 33,100 lives a year across the UK, around 91 a day.

NHS chiefs hope that deploying AI and robotic technology will help doctors uncover more cases, which will enable treatment to start sooner and enhance the patient’s chances of survival. The trial will be undertaken at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS trust in London.

In the trial, AI software will analyse lung scans and alert doctors to the presence of small lumps – some just 6mm long, the size of a grain of rice – that are most likely to be cancerous.

A robotic camera will then guide the miniature tools used to undertake a biopsy, to produce a sample of tissue that can be analysed in a laboratory more precisely than with existing techniques. That will enable potentially cancerous nodules hidden deep in someone’s lung, which are hard to spot at present, to be removed and examined.

NHS England said that if proven effective, the technology could help transform lung cancer diagnosis as the screening programme increasingly identifies more people with very small nodules that would previously have gone undetected until much later.