AI researchers, clinicians and entrepreneurs explored the potential of AI for healthcare at a showcase Imperial Global USA event in San Francisco.
An expert-led panel discussion featuring speakers from Imperial, Stanford, UCSF and the pharmaceutical industry exchanged insights into AI and digital health, with a focus on exploring shared challenges and opportunities for transatlantic partnership.
Imperial's Professor of AI and Neuroscience Aldo Faisal and Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Anthony Gordon also introduced two key Imperial-led initiatives that have the potential to support clinicians and patients, the next-generation foundation model Nightingale AI using the UK's healthcare data and the AI Clinician, the first semi-autonomous AI for treating patients in intensive care.
With the Bay Area famous as a wellspring of technological innovation, participants discussed opportunities for its innovators to collaborate with counterparts in London, drawing on the UK capital's world-leading science, talent pool, and large health datasets provided by the UK's National Health Service (NHS) as part its mission to support public health.
Sharing a panel were academics from Stanford University, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and Imperial, and a senior executive from the pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Also present was a cohort of Imperial startup founders in California to build links with the Bay Area ecosystem. The event was a collaboration between Imperial Global USA, Imperial Enterprise and AI for Healthcare Centres (AI4Health).
Expert insights
Attendees heard about powerful ways AI can be applied to healthcare fields as varied as epidemiology, drug discovery and clinical decision-making.
Professor Marina Sirota, Acting Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at UCSF, spoke about research using electronic healthcare records that yielded a model which can be used to predict a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. She also discussed the implementation of automated medical notetaking powered by AI to improve face-to-face interactions between patients and clinicians.
But the panel reflected that with AI only beginning to make its mark on healthcare, lessons need to be learned to deliver on its full potential and make AI "patient-ready".
Nigam Shah, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and Chief Data Scientist at Stanford Health Care, said that although thousands of AI tools are licensed for healthcare in the United States, uptake is still low. "How many humans got better care because an AI tool was in play? The answer is vanishingly small."
Jared Josleyn, Vice President and Global Head of Digital Healthcare at Sanofi, discussed the so-called 'Turing trap', in which AI developers place undue emphasis on replicating human cognitive abilities rather than creating new ones. The panel concurred that innovations such as those presented by Imperial are examples of doing "new stuff instead of doing old stuff with AI".
Mr Joselyn added that healthy citizens spend on average only 84 minutes per year in clinical settings, and that considering a global shortage of clinicians, there should be greater incentives to invest in innovation in preventive medicine – an area where the UK has been pioneering for many years.
UK's strengths in healthcare research
Keynote speaker Professor Aldo Faisal, director of the UKRI Centres in AI for Healthcare and AI for Digital Health, are drawing on the UK's vast datasets that can maximise the performance and robustness of AI and create the confidence needed for their real-word implementation.
Professor Faisal said: "The NHS provides care to over 65 million people under a single national, central management system. This creates a dataset that links primary and secondary care records, providing a powerful ability to track patients through their healthcare journey from cradle to grave. The depth and scale of such a dataset make it possible to evaluate long-term outcomes and trends, and achieve a scale that enables us to train AIs to unprecedented levels of medical intelligence."
Initiatives in London and Wales, he added, are providing researchers with secure access to large sets of anonymised health data for research that benefits public health, including the development of a more effective and trustworthy AI tools at Imperial's Testbed in Digital Health.
Professor Faisal presented the potential of the health foundation model, Nightingale AI, that is set to be trained on these large datasets. "With the ability to read X-rays, electrocardiograms, genetic data, electronic health records, doctors' letters, data from wearables, and clinical trial results, Nightingale AI will be able to support a range of healthcare applications, including medical research, clinical decision-making, and drug discovery," he said.
Imperial's long-standing transatlantic collaborations
The event was aimed at further strengthening transatlantic partnerships that draw on the US's expertise in innovation in healthcare and technology, and the UK's unique research strengths and assets including its science and its comprehensive datasets.
Imperial has an extensive track record of collaboration with US partners to advance healthcare AI. This includes a partnership with the California-based company Heartflow to use AI and imaging data to improve the diagnosis and management of heart conditions and a collaboration with the Children's Hospital of Orange County to further expand the AI Clinician model for use in paediatric care.
Championing Imperial innovation in the USA
"Nanograb's strategy is focused on a combination of internal research programmes and an initial partnership with a top 10 public pharma company. We believe that San Francisco is the epicentre of new technologies and the energy in the city is incredible." Debesh Mandal Imperial student and Founder of Nanograb
Imperial's innovation driven ecosystem supports the translation of blue sky discovery science all the way through the translation pipeline and into market-ready products and services., Imperial is home to a large community of entrepreneurs, many of which are developing solutions in medical technology and digital health.
Showcasing a range of healthcare applications at this event was a cohort of startups that included Nanograb, a spinout using AI to accelerate drug discovery, Steward.ai, which supports clinical decision-making, Surgery AI, which improves healthcare scheduling, Beyond Blood Diagnostics, which helps chronically ill patients monitor their health, and Ethomix which presented on AI-driven biomarkers and life-signs.
Imperial Enterprise Lab is a dedicated support service for students, staff and alumni who want to develop their entrepreneurial mindset, skills, and networks.
Join Imperial Global USA on LinkedIn to read in-depth interviews with each of these founders and Professor Faisal.
Image credit: DebbieVegaPhotography
