University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust has today launched a new project to investigate whether Artificial Intelligence could help lead to better prevention and earlier diagnosis of patients with bowel cancer.

CESCAIL is a joint initiative between UHCW NHS Trust, Corporate Health International (CHI) and the University of Barcelona that may also help detect a wide range of gastrointestinal diseases.

It will evaluate how effective AI can be in performing a preliminary analysis on thousands of camera images.

Professor Ramesh Arasaradnam OBE, who is leading the study, said: “It is very exciting for us to be beginning this study.

“Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer, with about 42,000 new cases per year, and we know earlier diagnosis translates to better patient outcomes.

“Indications are that the technology can save clinicians up to 80 per cent of the time they would usually spend in reviewing and reporting video images.”

CHI provide home-based Colon Capsule Endoscopy (CCE) using a swallowable camera the size of a large vitamin pill.

Accurately analysing up to 400,000 images is a time consuming workload for clinicians that could be better spent with patients.

As a result, scientists from the University of Barcelona have developed machine learning algorithms that significantly reduce that time.

UHCW will now be the sponsor organisation in a 19-month study that will involve four other hospital trusts and eligible patients will be invited to take part.

Outcomes from the AI technology will be double checked by clinicians and compared against routine analysis to see whether it has proved successful.

Funding has been provided by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) as part of the AI in Health and Care Award.