I-CAIRD: Industrial Centre for AI Research in Digital Diagnostics

"iCAIRD will be a Scottish centre of excellence, centred at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow but with sites across Scotland, to enable joined up academic and commercial technology development and research, locally and nationally. Making use of the capability of modern computers to process the large amounts of data gathered in healthcare clinics iCAIRD will enable better and earlier diagnosis of conditions, sooner treatment and better outcomes for patients.

iCAIRD, draws together Scotland's expertise in clinical and academic digital radiology and pathology, advanced data storage, data governance and access, inter-operable databases and will develop a vibrant community using multiscale data sources to develop clinically relevant and commercially practicable solutions. It adds to and complements collaboration with other national initiatives led by NSS.

With Canon, we will build a network of ""Safe-Haven Artificial Intelligence Platforms"" (SHAIP) within existing NHS data 'safe-havens'. We will do this in Glasgow and then Aberdeen, eventually scaling nationwide. This will support a distributed approach to training AI whilst ensuring, identifiable patient data stays in the NHS. The regional nature also enables small companies (SMEs) to work closely with doctors at a local level.

We will complete the conversion of the Glasgow Pathology Department, the largest in Europe, from conventional microscopes to digital technology. By linking with the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre we will establish a secure, National Pathology Research Image Database with guidance from Philips. This will receive and store images from different sites, even when obtained using different equipment, ensuring that data is accessible as widely as possible, maximising benefit.

Canon Medical and Philips are providing £5M of additional funding to support iCAIRD. Once operational, we will seek to create further projects with the aim of leveraging further industry support. However, several SMEs are already involved in this work and will access data and develop solutions for stroke medicine; chest x-ray reading; gynaecological pathology; mammogram analysis; and, improving diagnosis and predictions for colon cancer.

iCAIRD will adopt an ethical framework based on current best practice within HDRUK, ensuring patient data are securely held within the NHS whilst enabling companies, researchers and clinicians to work together to develop more effective and efficient diagnostic tools for patients. We will support SMEs to engage with healthcare challenges through the development of an Accelerator Programme providing access to regulatory and route to market expertise from our partner companies, driving economic growth as well as patient benefits."