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King’s College Hospital using AI to diagnose stroke patients

A new AI tool will help doctors offer personalised care to patients

Stroke MRI
1st November 2021 about a 2 minute read
"AI will hugely support our work and help us personalise care and treatment for patients through providing richer information about the individuals and their illness.” James Teo, professor of neurology at King’s College Hospital

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help diagnose and treat stroke patients.

The stroke AI tool is being used to analyse scans and data, with the aim both of speeding up diagnosis and of helping doctors to develop personalised treatment plans.

It is one of a number of tools that make up the AI Deployment Engine, or AIDE, developed by the trust’s AI Centre. AIDE is designed to support the deployment of multiple AI tools into a hospital, integrating them with existing clinical workflow. This use of a single interface lowers the cost of delivering AI, as well as improving patient outcomes.

Anonymised patient data will be fed into AIDE, which will then build up a detailed picture of the different types of stroke patients can experience, and the best treatment in each case. As well as providing richer detail to inform treatment decisions, it will enable clinicians to intervene earlier.

AI provides richer information about patients and their illnesses

Professor Seb Ourselin, the deputy director of the AI Centre, described the adoption of the stroke AI tool as a “critical milestone into our journey to enable safe and robust deployment of AI innovations into the clinic.” He added: “This could only be achieved through a strong partnership between the academic and industry sectors with the NHS. We are looking forward to scale-up our platform across our 10 NHS Trust partners and beyond.”

James Teo, professor of neurology at King’s College Hospital, said that King’s “will be sharing the capabilities of artificial intelligence with colleagues across London to improve the lives of our patients. AI will hugely support our work and help us personalise care and treatment for patients through providing richer information about the individuals and their illness.”

The stroke tool was developed in collaboration with teams at University College London and King’s College London, with support from the Wellcome Trust. The AI Centre, which was launched in 2019, is jointly led by King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. The Centre consortium has more than 30 partners in all, including 10 NHS Trusts, four universities and a number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and multinational organisations.

Although AIDE has been deployed initially to the stroke team, King’s College Hospital plans to roll it out to other clinical areas in future.