King's College London

Thursday 28 February saw the official opening event for the London Medical Imaging & Artificial Intelligence Centre for Value-Based Healthcare, established as part of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.  

The new Centre will train sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms from NHS medical images and patient data to provide tools for clinicians to speed up and improve diagnosis and care across a number of patient pathways including dementia, heart failure and cancer.  

It brings together an ambitious consortium including two other universities (Imperial and Queen Mary’s University London), King’s Health Partners NHS Foundation Trust partners, Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley, with Bart’s Health, multinational industry (Siemens, NVIDIA, IBM, GSK), 10 UK-based SME’s and the Health Innovation Network. 

The event at County Hall saw presentations showcasing both the technical infrastructure, importance of the partnerships and the potential clinical impact. Speakers included:  

• Professor Reza Razavi, Centre Director: Vision and Aims of the Centre  
• Professor Sebastien Ourselin, Head of the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences: Building our MedTech Hub at St Thomas’ Hospital  
• Dr M Jorge Cardoso, Chief Technical Officer:  A Federated Model for healthcare data access 
• Dr Gerry Carr-White: The role of AI in clinical cardiology: Heart Failure   
• Professor Daniel Rueckert: AI-enabled fetal screening  
• Professor Julia Schnabel: AI for early detection & prognosis of lung cancer 
• Dr James Teo: Stroke prevention with AI  
• Dr Mark Michalski, Executive Director of MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science: The US experience of AI enabled healthcare

The Centre has a focus on transformation and value-based healthcare, and how advanced imaging and AI technologies can be used to improve the patient journey. From earlier diagnosis if there is a problem and reassurance if not, to moving quickly to a treatment which is tailored to the patient and will result in the best possible outcome. By optimising triage and targeting resources, these technologies will also allow the NHS to reduce wasted effort that is not supporting patient care, and deliver significant financial savings. 

Importantly the Centre will also ensure that the technologies developed become products that can be used across the NHS and also exported internationally. To achieve this the Centre will co-locate researchers, clinicians and industry partners at its hub in St Thomas’ Hospital. Siemens Healthineers is making a substantial £6.6M investment into the UK by making the Centre their European Stratifies Medicine Hub. This along with other major investments from NVIDIA, IBM and GSK will help to leverage UK research strengths and clinical knowledge into becoming a leading industrial player in AI and healthcare.