Doctors will urge the UK data regulator to investigate whether NHS England broke the law when training its generative AI model, Foresight, on patient data.
Doctors are preparing a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office, alleging that NHS England breached data protection rules by including general practice patient data intended solely for COVID-19 research in a more general AI model without patients’ consent, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly.
At the request of the University of Cambridge, the UK authorities and Public Health England provided scientists with the entire dataset on COVID-19 patients in the country in anonymised form during the 2020 pandemic.
Researchers trained a neural network on these data sets, enabling them to predict how COVID-19 affected the demand for resources such as ventilators and intensive care beds at the hospital level.
The data set processed by Adjutorium’s artificial intelligence (AI) included information on patient hospitalisation, ventilator use, treatment rates and outcomes. Thanks to this data, AI has learned to predict which patients will benefit most from the use of ventilators, how many people a single hospital can admit in a month, and how many people will be left without help.
The AI is trained on information about 1,700 patients with coronavirus infection. Similar AI is being developed by other companies and universities. For example, AI developed by Jvion predicts which coronavirus patients need hospitalisation.
Earlier, American specialists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a neural network capable of identifying coronavirus by the sound of a cough. Researchers hope to use their development to create an app that can be used for the initial diagnosis of COVID-19.
