Developing synergies between transient astronomy and early medical intervention

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare will revolutionise medicine and patient care over the coming decades. The wealth of data being collected by medical professionals keeps growing and they need significant help to quickly understand this information for their key diagnostic tests. In particular, can this wealth of digital data be used to automatically detect possible problems early, and thus alert doctors for closer inspection?

Astronomy is also experiencing a data revolution driven by STFC experiments like LIGO and LSST. These experiments are opening up the time domain in astronomy and in the near-future astronomers will be deluged by millions of transient events a day; LSST will produce on average hundreds of transients per second! The prioritisation of so many events will be key to our success and astrophysicists are already developing and applying AI technology to help find the most interesting events within the ocean of "ordinary" transients.

This project brings these two problems together by applying the knowledge and expertise developed in transient astronomy to the early automated diagnosis of medical problems. This project is at the forefront of interdisciplinary research bring world-leading cardiologists from King's College Hospital together with the best transient astrophysicists in the UK. Together, we hope to find early diagnostic signatures in detailed time-series patient data e.g. ECGs. This pilot activity will be used to prime-pump future investigations and grow the number of scientists engaged in such impactful research.

This proposal will provide a range of impacts:

1. Development of interdisciplinary research on two cardiology data science projects to create early AI diagnostic tests for cardiac arrest. While still at an early stage, we would hope the outcomes of these projects would inform and influence long-term healthcare providing quicker alerts for doctors to make time critical decisions. Such societal impact is at the heart of the UK Industrial Strategy which seeks to put the UK at the forefront of AI in healthcare.

2. We will engage with a larger range of scientists, doctors and industrialists across the southeast to grow research and innovation capacity for precision healthcare and early diagnosis. These innovators will then be encouraged to explore their ideas through two dedicated hackathons provide rapid prototyping of possible solutions. These solutions will form the basis for future proposals and investment, gain both societal and commercial impact.