GPs use AI to boost cancer detection rates in England by 8%

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The rate of cancer detection rose from 58.7% to 66.0% at GP practices using the “C the Signs” AI tool. This analyses a patient’s medical record to pull together their past medical history, test results, prescriptions and treatments, as well as other personal characteristics that might indicate cancer risk, such as their postcode, age and family history.

It also prompts GPs to ask patients about any new symptoms, and if the tool detects patterns in the data that indicate a higher risk of a particular type of cancer, then it recommends which tests or clinical pathway the patient should be referred to.

C the Signs is used in about 1,400 practices in England – about 15% – and was tested in 35 practices in the east of England in May 2021, covering a population of 420,000 patients.

The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, show that the cancer detection rate rose from 58.7% to 66.0% by 31 March 2022, while those practices not using the system remained at a similar rate.

Bea Bakshi, a GP who created the system with her colleague, Miles Payling, said: “It could be a scan, an ultrasound, or they could need to be seen by a specialist at a clinic.”

Patients are tracked through the C the Signs system to remind doctors to check test results and referrals elsewhere. “Our system has detected over 50 different types of cancers,” Bakshi said. “The key thing is that it’s not only an earlier diagnosis, but a faster diagnosis.”

Bakshi and her colleagues also sought to validate the tool by assessing 118,677 patients in a previous study, which found that 7,295 were diagnosed with cancer and 7,056 were successfully identified by the algorithm.

Where the tool came to the conclusion that it was unlikely a patient did have cancer, only 239 out of 8,453 went on to have a confirmed cancer diagnosis within six months (about 2.8%). Bakshi developed the tool after meeting a patient in hospital who had been given a late diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and died three weeks later.