SCOTTISH hospitals will undergo a £1m project to assess the safety of AI usage in the healthcare industry.
NHS Lothian and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) are partnering with AI evaluation company Aival in the independent project to test the safety and performance of AI products in Scotland for the triage of stroke and lung cancer.
The £1m project, funded by Innovate UK, brings together hospitals, universities and tech companies with the aim of speeding up the adoption of AI products in the Scottish NHS.
Testing a single piece of AI software currently takes more than nine months, and with more than 200 AI products available for a single hospital department, checking all of them individually using traditional clinical trial or service evaluation models is not realistic.
The result is that very few trials turn into real-world solutions, meaning that patients, hospitals and AI developers all lose out.
The collaboration will use Aival’s independent evaluation platform to assess AI systems in a secure environment, with all patient data anonymised and remaining within an NHS secure environment.
Evaluation will allow hospitals to verify AI performance across diverse patient populations before deployment and then continue to monitor performance once a chosen AI solution is deployed.
The use of AI can improve outcomes and increase efficiency in healthcare systems.
However, AI models produce variable results when applied to different demographics or when changes are made to a given clinical workflow, causing their accuracy to vary and reducing operator trust.
The project will assess the use of the Aival platform to compare six commercial AI products for the triage of stroke and lung cancer patients from AI developers InferVision, Annalise-AI and Qure.AI – who are all collaborating with the programme.
Aival will be integrated into the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde infrastructure via Calantic Digital Solutions from Bayer – an AI orchestration platform that supports scalable deployment of curated algorithms in clinical routine.
Here, Avicenna CINA ICH will be deployed for the assessment of Intracerebral Hemorrhages (ICH).
