OptimalAI
Impact
IBM
The OptimalAI team have been long-time consultants to IBM for AI in healthcare.
Creating an immediate £116 million saving for the NHS using IBM Power AI to augment radiologists
Collaborating with IBM PowerAI
The OptimalAI team are long-time consultants to IBM to develop Deep Learning frameworks for the use of AI in healthcare. Designed to lower the barrier of entry required to create AI applications, IBM PowerAI Vision — a visual recognition solution running on IBM Power Systems — delivers an intuitive tool set that empowers users to create visual models without coding or deep learning expertise. As a result, organizations that lack data scientists can create highly accurate deep learning models to classify images and detect objects in images or videos.
Problem
The UK's National Health Service (NHS) was suffering one of the biggest Radiology staff shortages in history causing patient delays and increasing costs. Radiologist workloads in reading and interpreting scans had increased by 30% whilst having a consultant radiologist vacancy rate of 10%. UK hospital trusts were increasingly having to outsource scans or increase overtime on already highly stretched staff.
Solution
The OptimalAI team worked with IBM to alleviate the NHS's radiology problem by adapting the PowerAI platform to augment the skills of radiologists. NHS radiologists are now able to train algorithms on a dataset of millions of images with above 90% accuracy within half an hour. This has dramatically reduced the number of scans and x-rays needed to be assessed by radiologists both in the UK and around the world. Upon implementation, the platform immediately saved the NHS £116 million in outsourcing scans and staff overtime.
With approximately 70% of scans and x-rays typically classified as ‘normal’ and not requiring further investigation, PowerAI eliminates these from the radiologists’ workload. This leads to quicker feedback to clinical teams where no issues had been found and allows radiologists to focus on those scans that need further investigation.
PowerAI allows radiologists who've identified bottlenecks in radiology workflows to create powerful AI models by labelling images according to their specialist domain. Using a publicly available set of anonymized x-rays and scans radiologists can create a model that can rapidly classify whether an x-ray is ‘normal’ or needs further investigation. Obvious initial applications could be triaging of abnormal chest x-rays, breast mammograms or skeletal fracture detection.
AI models will always need human expertise to create the initial validation of images but Shah's work with IBM's PowerAI provides an environment that makes these easy to create without any prior programming knowledge, for the first time giving autonomy back to experienced clinicians who understand where AI can best augment workflow and are best served to use it. The unique platform provides the processing capacity based on IBM Power9 servers to enhance the time to accuracy.