The Centres of Excellence in Digital Pathology, Medical Imaging and AI were established in 2019 by Innovate UK in response to the ISCF Wave 2 Theme: Data to Early Diagnosis & Precision Medicine competition. The objective of both the D2EDPM Challenge and the Centres of Excellence was to build a network across the UK that could establish an innovation ecosystem to pave the way for the UK to be a global leader in this field.
The D2EDPM Challenge brought together NHS Trusts, academic institutions, global diagnostic industrials and UK SMEs, to establish ways to safely utilise digitised patient data to develop advanced AI algorithms and software. These capabilities could help to detect disease far earlier than previously possible.
To fulfil the ambition to establish the UK as a leader in this field, it was recognised that solutions developed by the Centres should be easily navigable and accessible by all stakeholder groups across the UK and globally. In practical terms, this meant that solutions were vendor agnostic, images could be shared across platforms, and algorithms developed with one NHS Trust could be shared across all NHS Trusts.
The Interoperability Recommendations emerging from seven cross-centre working groups have now been published by UKRI. PathLAKE led the Next Generation File Format (NGFF) workstream.
This report summarises the experience of the Centres of Excellence and is informative for data controllers, procurement and standards bodies, NHS strategic planning, AI developers, NHS Trusts and hardware manufacturers.
The full report can be downloaded from the following QR code. 
