National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging (NCIMI)

"We have formed a consortium of collaborating hospitals and commercial companies with public and patient involvement and input from charities to enable us to work with the public and the NHS to best develop and test the use of Artificial Intelligence programmes to improve health care. We are working with university academics and NHS hospitals across the country, from the south-west into London and including the North of England and Scotland. Our programme includes predominantly UK based companies ranging in size from a few employees to hundreds.

We aim to learn about the difficult areas of ethics and public acceptance for machine learning and decision making in health care, and the use of patient data by commercial companies. We will put in strict safeguards to ensure patients and all involved in health care are confident that their data is managed securely and in a manner that would meet with their approval. Our ambition is to develop a relationship with patients and the NHS that will enable improved development and use of Artificial Intelligence to enhance the delivery of safer, better care, with clinical and economic gains to the NHS. Our programme of work will include the analysis and testing of algorithms on data for which we already have patient consent, and the collection of new patient data for which we will gain consent. This data will be securely stored and made available under strict rules to our collaborating academics and universities, and to commercial companies. Once we have developed and tested the Artificial Intelligence algorithms we will then test them in the NHS following applications to, and approvals from Research Ethics Committees."