MIT Technology Review Subscribe

The UK wants to build a cancer-diagnosing AI to save lives

In her latest effort to make the UK a global leader in AI, British prime minister Theresa May announced plans today to spend millions on developing algorithms that can spot cancer.

The details: May wants to open up the medical data gathered by country’s National Health Service to companies and nonprofit groups interested in working with the government to build AI that can recognize signs of cancer. Along with collecting information about patients’ lifestyles, the goal is to create tools that general practitioners can use to refer patients to specialists.

Advertisement

Goals: The plan is for AI to diagnose 50,000 people at early stages of prostate, ovarian, lung, or bowel cancer a year by 2033. The UK government estimates that early diagnosis of these cancers could prevent as many as 22,000 deaths a year.

This story is only available to subscribers.

Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.

Subscribe now Already a subscriber? Sign in
You’ve read all your free stories.

MIT Technology Review provides an intelligent and independent filter for the flood of information about technology.

Subscribe now Already a subscriber? Sign in

But: The proposal raises questions about what the government will do to ensure privacy and ethical use of the data. May could help assuage critics by following through with her plan for a council on data ethics.

This is your last free story.
Sign in Subscribe now

Your daily newsletter about what’s up in emerging technology from MIT Technology Review.

Please, enter a valid email.
Privacy Policy
Submitting...
There was an error submitting the request.
Thanks for signing up!

Our most popular stories

Advertisement