PharosAI: navigating the path to AI-assisted healthcare

We are facing a UK and global challenge in healthcare.

The increase of complexity in tests and treatments and the decline in the health workforce worldwide is creating an unprecedented burden on healthcare systems. The current UK healthcare cost is £282 billion which is around 11% of the UK's GDP. There are currently 160,000 NHS job vacancies and the number of diagnostic tests is increasing by 10% each year.

However, the digitisation of imaging, the Genomic Medicine Service and the 2024 roll-out of digital pathology present unique opportunities to tackle these challenges with multimodal AI-driven precision medicine including: early detection, disease diagnosis, treatment prediction and discovery science.

High quality datasets to train AI models do not exist and the current R&D environment does not support efficient deployment of AI solutions into the NHS or healthcare providers. Additionally, there is a lack of clarity around clinical evaluations and regulatory approval pathways.

Thus, we propose PharosAI, a platform to provide highly curated and refined multi-modal datasets combined with digital solutions for swift development, robust clinical evaluation and efficient deployment of AI into the NHS.

Our platform will act as a "data refinery" creating clinically valuable and structured multimodal datasets primed for AI and will initially be built around two London biobanks.

An additional key pillar of PharosAI will be our education programmes to train the next generation of healthcare specialists, pathologists and computer scientists for the future sustainability of the NHS workforce.