The UK's National Health Service (NHS) will be the first healthcare system in the world to undertake algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs) in order to maximise the benefits and mitigate the harms of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in healthcare, the Ada Lovelace Institute said in a press release. The institute has designed the impact assessment for NHS. The NHS will undertake this assessment on a trial basis at the NHS AI Lab. "The framework will be used in a pilot to support researchers and developers in assessing the possible risks of an algorithmic system before they are granted access to NHS patient data," said the release. The institute will use two databases for the assessment, namely: the National Covid-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID) and the proposed National Medical Imaging Platform (NMIP). In the release, the institute described NCCID as a central database of medical images from hospital patients across the country that supports researchers to better understand COVID-19 and develop technology enabling the best care. "The proposed NMIP will expand on the NCCID and enable the training and testing of a wider range of AI systems using medical imaging for screening and diagnostics," it added. Data-driven technologies (including AI) are increasingly being used in healthcare to help with detection, diagnosis, and prognosis, the release said. However, there are legitimate concerns that AI could exacerbate health inequalities and entrench social biases (for example, training data biases have resulted in AI systems for diagnosing skin cancer risk being less accurate for people of colour).…
