Artificial intelligence developed by and for the NHS at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge in a study led by Dr Raj Jena (Medicine 1989) is reducing the amount of time cancer patients wait for radiotherapy treatment. 

“OSAIRIS” is saving many hours of doctors’ time in preparing scans and helping to cut the time patients have to wait between referral for radiotherapy and starting treatment.

Working alongside this AI technology, specialists can plan for radiotherapy treatments approximately two and half times faster than if they were working alone, ensuring more patients can get treatment sooner and improving the likelihood of cure.

The technology is currently being used at Addenbrooke’s for prostate and head and neck cancers, but has the potential to work for many other types of cancer, benefitting patients across the NHS. 

Dr Raj Jena, oncologist at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, led the research for the NHS and University of Cambridge. His research includes long-term collaborations with Microsoft Research on an AI research project known as Project InnerEye to develop machine learning techniques to support the global medical imaging community. To broaden access to research in this field, Microsoft Research made available Project InnerEye toolkits as open-source software.

With a £500,000 grant from the NHS AI Lab, Dr Jena’s team created a new AI tool, OSAIRIS, using open-source software from Project InnerEye and data from patients who had previously been treated in the hospital and agreed to contribute to the research.

OSAIRIS works by significantly cutting the amount of time a doctor needs to spend drawing around healthy organs on scans before radiotherapy. Outlining the organs, known as ‘segmentation’, is critical in order to protect the healthy tissue around the cancer from radiation.  It can take a doctor between 20 minutes and three hours to perform this task, per patient. This complex but routine task is ideally suited to AI with the oncologist in control, checking every scan after OSAIRIS has done the segmentation.   

Rigorous tests and risk assessments have been carried out to ensure OSAIRIS is safe and can be used in the day-to-day care of radiotherapy patients across the NHS. In masked tests, known as ‘Turing tests’, doctors were unable to tell the difference between the work of OSAIRIS and the work of a doctor colleague.   

Dr Raj Jena said: “OSAIRIS does much of the work in the background so that when the doctor sits down to start planning treatment, most of the heavy lifting is done. It is the first cloud-based AI technology to be developed and deployed within the NHS. Having carried out 18 months of rigorous testing, we are now able to share this technology safely across the NHS for patient benefit.

“We’ve already started to work on a model that works in the chest, so that will work for lung cancer and breast cancer particularly. And also, from my perspective as a neuro-oncologist, I’m interested that we’re building the brain model as well so that we’ve got something that works for brain tumours too.”

To read the full media release, visit the Cambridge University Hospitals-NHS website.