Answer Digital wins AI Project of the Year award for multi-modal platform

Answer Digital was awarded the Artificial Intelligence Project of the Year award at the UK IT Industry Awards 2023, for its work in advancing AI to accelerate the diagnosis of health conditions within the NHS.

The company is working with The London Medical Imaging and AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare – a consortium of 10 NHS trusts. Together they are working to deploy a multi-modal AI platform to support clinicians with faster and more accurate diagnosis and treatments, personalised therapies and effective screening across a range of conditions and procedures.

The annual UK IT Industry Awards celebrated the top achievements in the tech world over the past year.

Richard Pugmire, director at Answer Digital, said: “The award is fantastic recognition for the hard work of the Answer team. We have developed a very close partnership with the NHS on what has become a nationally significant innovation that advances personalised and digitally-enabled healthcare provision across the whole service.”

The AI Deployment Engine, AIDE, is a platform that has been designed to implement AI at scale. It creates a single interface for the deployment of many different AI tools directly to NHS frontline services.

It receives a live stream of medical imaging data which allows clinicians to access near real-time AI analysis in seconds. Following the analysis of the data by the AI technology, results are sent directly to the EPR to support clinical decision-making. This is helping to both speed up and improve diagnosis and care across patient pathways including stroke, dementia, heart failure and cancer.

Federated Data platform FLIP allows data from multiple NHS trusts to be used to train new AI models for future clinical use. The patient data is never pooled or shared outside of the originating NHS trust thanks to privacy-preserving Federated Learning technology.

So successful has AIDE’s use been at Kings College Hospital, that it has now been rolled out to a further six NHS trusts, supporting its role as an effective channel for widespread AI deployment in the NHS.

Pugmire added: “The AI programme allows Answer to bring the best technical, clinical and academic minds together to deliver a solution, capable of changing the way healthcare is provided for many years to come. Given the expertise of the partners involved and the nature of AI as a tool, the whole project has the capacity to be truly transformative for the NHS.”

The Goverment’s £21m AI Diagnostic Fund was recently shared out between 64 NHS trusts to roll out artificial intelligence tools to help speed up the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer.