Imperial engineer to develop AI clinician to help frontline health workers

Professor Aldo Faisal has won a Turing AI Fellowship to develop AI that will help doctors make complex decisions.

Professor Faisal, from the Departments of Computing and Bioengineering at Imperial College London, has been announced as one of 15 Turing AI Fellows by UKRI. The five-year awards are designed to accelerate and support the careers of the best and brightest AI (artificial intelligence) researchers, enabling them to become world-leading researchers in the five years of the award.

Core to our AI technology is that it is focussed on augmenting human decision-makers, such as medical doctors. Professor Aldo Faisal

He aims to develop an ‘AI clinician’ colleague to aid doctors and clinicians and relieve pressure on the NHS. The system could also be used in sectors such as aerospace or energy, where accurate decision-making under high-pressure conditions is crucial.

Professor Faisal said: “This UKRI Turing AI Fellowship recognises many years efforts by my team and myself to develop machine learning methods that can learn complex skills from human interactions. Core to our AI technology is that it is focussed on augmenting human decision-makers, such as medical doctors, and empowering them by giving them an ‘AI colleague’ to interact with who has distilled the experiences from millions of treated patients.”

Learning complex skills

Professor Faisal focuses on the development of algorithms that can learn from human behaviour and human interactions to learn complex skills. With this new fellowship, he will be able to focus and develop an ‘AI clinician’ that can tirelessly watch over patients and recommend medical interventions to human clinicians, such as prescribing drugs, changing doses or other interventions.

The UK is the birthplace of artificial intelligence and we therefore have a duty to equip the next generation of Alan Turings, like London’s Professor Aldo Faisal, with the tools that will keep the UK at the forefront of this remarkable technological innovation. Amanda Solloway Science Minister

The system will learn this complex skill by distilling the data from thousands of real doctors treating millions of real patients into one system of AI best clinical practice. The AI will automatically present the recommendations for actions, and the reasoning behind these recommendations, in a way that decision-makers can understand, helping human doctors to make the best decisions on the course of action for a patient.

Professor Faisal received substantial industry support for this fellowship from healthcare, but also the energy and aerospace sector, which are keen to develop ways of deploying this AI technology in their respective industries.

Professor Faisal’s labs, the Brain & Behaviour lab and the Behaviour Analytics Lab, operate at the interface of artificial and human intelligence. He is one of the few computer scientists worldwide that leads clinical trials to test and deploy their own algorithms. He is the director of the £20m UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI for Healthcare and the elected Speaker of the Imperial College Cross-Faculty network in AI.

World leader in AI and data

Named after British AI pioneer Alan Turing, the £20 million fellowship scheme will be delivered by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute and the UK government’s Office for Artificial intelligence.

As a result of the £20m government investment, Fellows will work with academia and industry to help elevate their world-class research and transfer their innovations from the lab to the real world. These innovations have the potential to change how people live, work and communicate, helping to place the UK at the forefront of the AI and data revolution. 

Science Minister, Amanda Solloway said: “The UK is the birthplace of artificial intelligence and we therefore have a duty to equip the next generation of Alan Turings, like London’s Professor Aldo Faisal, with the tools that will keep the UK at the forefront of this remarkable technological innovation.

“London has a rich and unique history of innovating and this inspiring AI project we are backing will assist doctors and clinicians when treating patients, helping to relieve pressure on our brilliant NHS, while cementing the UK’s status as a world leader in AI and data.”

-

Based on a press release by UKRI.