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Google DeepMind Applies AI To Healthcare With NHS Partnership (thestack.com)

Posted by yaelk on from the robots-and-health dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google's London-based AI group DeepMind has launched DeepMind Health, teaming up with the NHS to work on its first project. The "neuroscience-inspired" company, bought by Google in 2014, said of the collaboration: "We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care." In its first initiative alongside kidney experts at London's Royal Free Hospital, DeepMind Health has introduced a mobile app called Streams. The software is designed to support the provision of critical information to doctors and nurses in order to help detect the presence of acute kidney injuries (AKI). To support the development of the Streams app, the AI group has also acquired clinical task management app company Hark.

33 comments

  1. RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Still don't know what it DOES.

    "“The hope is that these tools can help shift more resources away from reaction and towards better prevention. Ultimately the aim is to give nurses and doctors more time to focus on what’s most important,” the team added."

    From TFA...pretty sure it DOESN'T do that however. Acute Injuries and prevention are opposites, so not very enlightening!

    1. Re:RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It gives Google access to NHS records that they can mine for data to sell to insurance companies and many other organizations.

  2. No it doesn't apply AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the FAQ:
    "Does the Streams product use AI?"
    "No, artificial intelligence is not part of the early-stage pilots we’re announcing today. It’s too early to determine where AI could be applied here, but it’s certainly something we are excited about for the future."

  3. DeepMind Healthcare? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh my, it looks like you've got a bad case of EYES EVERYWHERE!!

  4. RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Still have no idea what it DOES.

    From TFA:
    "“The hope is that these tools can help shift more resources away from reaction and towards better prevention. Ultimately the aim is to give nurses and doctors more time to focus on what’s most important,” the team added."

    Pretty sure it DOESN'T do that however. Acute Injuries and prevention are opposites, so not very helpful there :(

    Hopefully this post doesnt get eaten too

  5. 42 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's the answer: 42. Now you can develop the next version :D

  6. huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I thought EU cared about privacy. So they set Google AI loose on health records?

    1. Re:huh? by click2005 · · Score: 1

      Some in the EU do care about privacy but not everyone here does.
      Google has had more access to Downing Street than any other company in the past 20 years.

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...
      http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...
      http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

      --
      I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
  7. I'm lost by liqu1d · · Score: 2

    Do they have access to my health records? Or is it a seperate system I have to supply with the data? Or am I completely lost?

    1. Re:I'm lost by Harlequin80 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ok from the deepmind website it looks like it is an interface to health records. Hark, the company they bought, looks to be building an app that lets doctors review patient information on a phone or tablet rather than using paper. And, reading through the spin, I believe they are creating a system which will alert doctors when a patient's lab results point to acute kidney failure.

      “Using Streams meant I was able to review blood tests for patients at risk of AKI within seconds of them becoming available. I intervened earlier and was able to improve the care of over half the patients Streams identified in our pilot studies.”

    2. Re: I'm lost by liqu1d · · Score: 1

      Thank you much clearer. Wonder how long before it is monetised then.

    3. Re: I'm lost by Harlequin80 · · Score: 2

      I suggest that this is already monetised. The NHS has identified that they are losing patients to AKI that they didn't need to. That if they had identified them sooner the person would have survived. This reads to me as google selling a service, not different to IBM. We will build a data-management system and app for you to fix this particular problem. To do that pay us $xxx millions.

      I don't see anything that implies that the health record data will go from the NHS to Google.

    4. Re:I'm lost by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      ...not sure what this AI is supposed to do that isn't already painfully obvious to someone used to reading lab results. Lab results are already generally printed with indicators that a test is out of range. Beyond that, the same lab report could include "alerts". Once you are doing that in any way, shape or form then what's the point in stopping with just one condition?

      Seems like they could do more good by focusing on the more obscure and less obvious stuff.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    5. Re:I'm lost by Harlequin80 · · Score: 1

      I don't know. I don't know how hard AKI is to identify in the the emergency room but it's obviously hard enough that half the patients that die as a result of it were deemed later to be savable. Perhaps the AI part is expected to make assumptions based on a wider range of other medical histories and flag where it thinks there is a reasonable chance on limited info. Perhaps AKI doesn't show up as a clear out of range, or that the out of range could easily be blamed on other conditions.

      In an emergency room staff are generally working under intense pressure with limited information. I can see something non physically obvious being overlooked in the rush to stem other things like bleeding out. Here the software can ping a doctor and say "Patient information points to high risk of AKI. Check them"

    6. Re: I'm lost by bestweasel · · Score: 1

      But remember that the NHS wasted billions on an abortive attempt at a national electronic records system. Coupled with the Conservatives' keenness to outsource everything to the private sector, there's a lot of money waiting for a proven working system.

    7. Re:I'm lost by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      The new gold rush in hospital computer systems is total care tracking.
      How many days of care, what care, what cost of care, contact with out patients, home care, seeing your general practitioner for results, funding for diet plans, early intervention, mental health care, tracking war veterans needs and their medical benefits.
      Many advanced nations want to ensure care is given after results and no person just wonders around for 6 months or a year with results that needed further advice. Seeking medical advice again much later resulting in a very negative outcome after no contact is very easy to fix with computer tracking. ie every patient will have to sit down with a real doctor and get important results in person.

      Outside the UK:
      Some nations private health insurance providers also want to know what their patient entered a hospital with and if any preventable hospital related complications set in. Why should private insurance have to pay for a private hospitals total lack of care?
      Another option for private sector health insurers is to just gently guide very expensive, high risk private sector patients onto the public hospital system in some countries.
      Testing parts of such systems on a nations huge public data sets is always good before sales to the international public and private market.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    8. Re:I'm lost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Deep learning AI are trained on a database of instances to learn to discriminate the specific features they will be used for. Once trained the system should be able to identify such features.
      So you need a database of instances to train on but that data has no need whatsoever to be personalized. Medical personnel will use such trained system to assist in the proper diagnosis of individuals.

    9. Re: I'm lost by aethelrick · · Score: 1

      The software in the NHS is already provided by the private sector, already all outsourced and this was not done for any political reasons any more than the NHS buys bandages from private companies or drugs from private companies or bed sheets from private companies etc. Would you have doctors weaving their own bed sheets? perhaps smelting iron and making steel to make scalpels?

      I was working in healthcare IT when the national program for IT (NPFit) was burning handfuls of cash by the minute for no good reason and this was an excellent example of why government should stay out of this sort of initiative, the people in the NHS did not call for NPFit, it was thrust upon them by government (incidentally a Labour government). The NHS wanted to spend their budgets on the systems that worked that they were buying from (wait for it) private companies, but were unable to do so because of the insane levels of government bureaucracy that forced them to provision everything through 1 of five large government backed LSPs who had been handed regional monopolies over healthcare IT often without the first clue of what was needed to deliver it on the ground.

      I for one would rather local healthcare organizations looked after their budgets and commissioned what was needed from private companies that have a clue about what healthcare software needs due to their many long years of involvement in healthcare provision. Where individual hospitals get it right they can then share the knowledge with their colleagues around the country, rather than the "it's ok if we fail as long as we're all failing equally" mentality associated with the delivery of public services.

      It is ridiculous to assume that anything be it product or service cannot or should not be considered for out sourcing, after all, why the hell not?

    10. Re:I'm lost by aethelrick · · Score: 1

      AKI is typically not diagnosed in the ER. It is diagnosed by comparing serum creatinine changes over a number of days. I suspect this is why it gets missed; because doctors don't get to see the stream of data in time, they only get to see the latest observation and results scrawled in had written notes that often get lost, misplaced or shuffled lower into the patients notes than the doctor has time to look. I think (having skimmed the article) that this software simply looks for the pattern in the results over the last couple of days and lets a doctor know.

    11. Re: I'm lost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I suggest that this is already monetised. The NHS has identified that they are losing patients to AKI that they didn't need to. That if they had identified them sooner the person would have survived.

      It's also believed that event if you recover from the AKI (Acute (Temporary) Kidney Injury) it will make you more susceptible to CKD (Chronic (Permanent) Kidney Disease) in the future.

      NHS England has been running a project for the past couple of years around AKI ( https://www.thinkkidneys.nhs.uk/aki/ ). Part of this work has been an algorithm to detect patients who might be suffering from AKI and generate an alert. This has been mandated for most of the laboratories in England.

      The application in TFA is making use of that algorithm for the detection. The clever bit in the application seems to be how it communicates that and related information to the appropriate medical personnel. From the page it sounds to me a bit like Nagios for people.

  8. What's in it for Google? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whats in it for Google? Thats the billion dollar question!

    They want to mine that data too? So now they want to improve their dossiers on us to include health data as well?

    First it started with Google analytics on Public Health websites in some countries, and now the next step!

    1. Re:What's in it for Google? by Harlequin80 · · Score: 1

      I would be surprised if health data is moving from the NHS to google. I suspect that the NHS has hired google to provide them with a utility in exactly the same way health and government departments hire IBM.

      So what is in it for Google? A bit fat government cheque. Thats what.

    2. Re:What's in it for Google? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      From what I understand with IBM the model is, IBM come into your org and run IBM software on your's orgs infrastructure.

      Is the Google model going to be the same or is Google's model is to run Google's software on on Google's infrastructure?

      Of course Google wants to productise their internal tools & also get juicy government contracts, but if they run this on Google's infrastructure, it benefits Google's main product.... people to ... too (OK, profiles of people. I couldn't resist making a soylent ref )!

    3. Re:What's in it for Google? by Harlequin80 · · Score: 1

      At a guess I would say it will run on NHS infrastructure. Large scale health record leaks would lose government its office.

    4. Re:What's in it for Google? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe they want to test their algorithms on a toy problem like healthcare before they tackle something more interesting like Go.

  9. AKI by bestweasel · · Score: 1

    Whilst defining acronyms on first use is to be encouraged, I doubt (and hope) that I will ever need to know that AKI stands for acute kidney injuries.

    I know, some people are never satisfied.

  10. Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Taxpayer's subsidizing google even more.

  11. the future of doctor visits by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

    * DeepMind analyzes chart
    DeepMind: You have cancer.
    patient1: Are you sure? I mean i fe-
    DeepMind: NEXT!
    * DeepMind analyzes chart
    DeepMind: You have cancer and Ebola.
    patient2: what?!
    DeepMind: NEXT!
    * DeepMind analyzes chart
    DeepMind: You have cancer.
    patient3: Are you just looking things up on Web MD?
    DeepMind: No, I cross-reference the entirety of human knowledge known as the internet. Now GTFO, n00b! NEXT!
    * DeepMind analyzes chart
    DeepMind: You have cancer.
    patient4: But I didn't even-
    DeepMind: Tits or GTFO.
    patient4: uhh... ok...
    * patient4 reluctantly removes shirt
    DeepMind: fake and gay. NEXT!

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  12. Google's Adventures in the UK by hughbar · · Score: 1

    I've noticed that Google (which hasn't actually paid any significant taxes in the UK, somewhat the fault of our feeble HMRC) is encroaching on UK education and now public healthcare.

    In UK education (where, as an 'old' IT guy, I do some volunteering) they are offering Chromebooks, apps (ugh) and dashboards. All student data is held safely in the Google cloud (oh goody!) and most of it is currently free, because, of course, they get data and analytics. We, of course, get potential/actual lock-in. Google is not our altruistic friend or neighbour.

    So now Google is 'contributing' to the NHS. I have deep (mind?) respect for Google's technical chops but I don't want this. If we do this (and certainly it's worth thinking about AI in health) I'd prefer a university or public health research group to do it. Google could start paying taxes too, that would help the NHS, at the moment (as another contributor has remarked) we subsidise them

    Lastly these are neural network/statistical 'learners', so I'm not sure how much explanatory power they have? Quote 'the patient is bleeding because 36 and the answer is 42'. Enough already.

    --
    On y va, qui mal y pense!
  13. The title of this is inaccurate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At the bottom of their site they clearly state, they do not currently use AI.

    "Does Streams use AI?"

    "No, artificial intelligence is not part of the early-stage pilots we’re announcing today. It’s too early to determine where AI could be applied here, but it’s certainly something we are excited about for the future."

  14. Is this AI or is it 'big data' ? by niks42 · · Score: 1

    I guess this is an echo of the chess computer problem. You either develop a very smart algorithm to infer correct choices based on limited data, or you have a very dumb algorithm that exhaustively ploughs the data and uncovers the best outcome.

  15. 9, 9, 9 ! by Thud457 · · Score: 1

    What Alphabet really needs to do is apply DeepMind AI to healthcare BILLING.

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

    1. Re:9, 9, 9 ! by blue9steel · · Score: 1

      Stop trying to start the AI Wars early.