EDITH

Early Detection using Information Technology in Health (EDITH)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used more commonly in the NHS. This study is looking to see how well AI could support the breast screening programme in the UK.

We plan to have 660000 women take part in the study from 30 breast screening centres. Women will be informed about the study when they get their screening (mammogram) invitation letter. All women who attend participating screening centres will take part in the study. If a woman prefers that their images are not looked at with the help of AI they can opt out of the study.

Within the study, some women will receive standard breast screening, where two NHS experts look at the breast images for signs of cancer. Other women will receive AI-assisted breast screening, where the AI helps the NHS expert(s) by also looking for signs of cancer. We will try out two different types of AI-assisted breast screening. The first type AI is after the NHS expert to look for cancers that they might have missed. The second type the AI is used first to say whether there is a high or low risk of cancer. All images will be read by a human expert with final decisions about cancer detection made by standard human arbitration.

Women will be followed up until their screening episode is closed and then for a further four years through the screening programme and cancer registries to ascertain if they develop a cancer in the future.

The study aims to test whether NHS experts working with AI is better than without. Results from the three groups will be looked at to see how well humans combined with AI assistance works compared to the human readers alone and the costs and benefits of this.

660,000 women

1. Cancer detection rate

2. Recall rate

Planned trial duration: 4 years