Public Funding for Glencoe Software Limited

"iCAIRD will be a Scottish centre of excellence, centred at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow but with sites across Scotland, to enable joined up academic and commercial technology development and research, locally and nationally. Making use of the capability of modern computers to process the large amounts of data gathered in healthcare clinics iCAIRD will enable better and earlier diagnosis of conditions, sooner treatment and better outcomes for patients. iCAIRD, draws together Scotland's expertise in clinical and academic digital radiology and pathology, advanced data storage, data governance and access, inter-operable databases and will develop a vibrant community using multiscale data sources to develop clinically relevant and commercially practicable solutions. It adds to and complements collaboration with other national initiatives led by NSS. With Canon, we will build a network of ""Safe-Haven Artificial Intelligence Platforms"" (SHAIP) within existing NHS data 'safe-havens'. We will do this in Glasgow and then Aberdeen, eventually scaling nationwide. This will support a distributed approach to training AI whilst ensuring, identifiable patient data stays in the NHS. The regional nature also enables small companies (SMEs) to work closely with doctors at a local level. We will complete the conversion of the Glasgow Pathology Department, the largest in Europe, from conventional microscopes to digital technology. By linking with the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre we will establish a secure, National Pathology Research Image Database with guidance from Philips. This will receive and store images from different sites, even when obtained using different equipment, ensuring that data is accessible as widely as possible, maximising benefit. Canon Medical and Philips are providing £5M of additional funding to support iCAIRD. Once operational, we will seek to create further projects with the aim of leveraging further industry support. However, several SMEs are already involved in this work and will access data and develop solutions for stroke medicine; chest x-ray reading; gynaecological pathology; mammogram analysis; and, improving diagnosis and predictions for colon cancer. iCAIRD will adopt an ethical framework based on current best practice within HDRUK, ensuring patient data are securely held within the NHS whilst enabling companies, researchers and clinicians to work together to develop more effective and efficient diagnostic tools for patients. We will support SMEs to engage with healthcare challenges through the development of an Accelerator Programme providing access to regulatory and route to market expertise from our partner companies, driving economic growth as well as patient benefits."

"PathLEAD (**Path**ology data **L**akes, **E**ducation, **A**nalytics and **D**iscovery) is a consortium of nationally leading experts from the teaching hospitals of Coventry, Belfast, Nottingham and Oxford, their associated Universities and Philips, the commercial partner. We will develop computer aided diagnostics for testing of pathology samples. Specialist doctors (called pathologists) currently carry out testing via visual examination of pathology specimens under the microscope, a process that is inherently subjective. A large proportion of tissue samples examined are normal and using specialist pathologist time to establish this is expensive. We believe this can be done by computers, and valuable pathologist time saved and used elsewhere. Therefore we will develop a computer programme that will recognise normal tissue so that the sample does not need to examined by the pathologist. Furthermore we know that pathologists' performance is variable and in some cases limited, particularly where the tasks they perform are complex or require extensive experience. This can mean patients with some forms of breast and prostate cancer do not get the best treatment. Our computer programmes will assist the pathologist and improve these decisions. The development of these tools requires thousands of image files obtained from scanning microscope slides. This is time consuming to collect so once this data has been produced it is a valuable resource. We aim to make this available to other research teams, our commercial partner Philips and UK-based companies developing tools to improve healthcare. The result will be greater knowledge, improved tools and better care for the future. We recognise that patients have the right not to allow their data to be used for this purpose, and will be using the recently launched NHS National Data Opt Out scheme to record patients wishes accurately. Patients and lay representatives on our ethical and management committee will help decide how this data should be used. We expect that some tools will become successful commercially and plan to exploit this success re-investing some of the income back into the NHS to benefit patients. Our ability to provide high quality data, expertise, access to top-grade computer equipment and knowledge of commercialising these tools, will percolate to UK companies, building the economy in this sector and lead to the UK becoming a global leader. Our expertise will provide education to the pathology and computer science communities to share the knowledge gained, gaining in quality and efficiency, and having patients' benefit as our ultimate goal."