NHS England is to trial a combination of AI and robot-assisted care to speed up the detection and diagnosis of lung cancer, the UK’s most lethal form of the disease.
The trial comes at the same time as the health service pledges to offer all smokers and ex-smokers the chance to be screened for lung cancer by 2030.
That expansion will lead to an estimated 50,000 lung cancers being diagnosed by 2035, of which 23,000 will be at early stage, which could save thousands of lives, it said.
The disease is a particular focus of the government’s forthcoming national cancer plan for England because it is Britain’s biggest cancer killer, reflecting historic high rates of smoking. It claims 33,100 lives a year across the UK, about 91 a day.
It is also a key area for improvement because it is a stark example of health inequalities that mirror people’s wealth. It affects poorer people so disproportionately that it accounts for an entire year of the nine-year gap in life expectancy between England’s most and least deprived areas.
NHS chiefs hope that deploying AI and robotic technology will help doctors uncover more cases, which will enable treatment to start sooner and enhance the patient’s chances of survival. The trial will be undertaken at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS trust in London.
“This is a glimpse of the future of cancer detection”, said Prof Peter Johnson, NHS England’s national clinical director for cancer.
In the trial, AI software will analyse lung scans and alert doctors to the presence of small lumps – some just 6mm long, the size of a grain of rice – that are most likely to be cancerous.
A robotic camera will then guide the miniature tools used to undertake a biopsy, to produce a sample of tissue that can be analysed in a laboratory more precisely than with existing techniques. That will enable potentially cancerous nodules hidden deep in someone’s lung, which are hard to spot at present, to be removed and examined.
“If shown to be effective, the technology could help transform lung cancer diagnosis as the NHS screening programme increasingly identifies more people with very small nodules that would previously have gone undetected until much later”, NHS England said.
“For many patients, weeks of repeat scans and procedures could be replaced with a single half-hour cancer biopsy, reducing prolonged uncertainty and avoiding more invasive surgery.”
The team behind the trial has already carried out about 300 robotic biopsies, which led to 215 people having cancer treatment.
“Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the UK, but diagnosing it at an earlier stage can significantly improve people’s chances of survival”, said the chief executive of Cancer Research UK, Michelle Mitchell.
“New technologies like this have huge potential, and tests to ensure they’re accurate and beneficial for patients in the real world should happen quickly so that innovations can reach everyone sooner.”