NHS England - Transformation Directorate

NHS AI Lab Skunkworks

Demonstrating the potential for AI in health and social care

Following the successful completion of deep-dive workshops and proof of concept projects the AI Skunkworks programme has closed and will not be considering anymore applications.

  • What we did

    Read about our AI investigation projects and how we supported the NHS to benefit from AI solutions.

  • Access the code

    Open source code from NHS AI Lab Skunkworks projects so that others can explore and develop AI tools.

The AI Skunkworks programme looked for new ways to use AI for driving forward the early adoption of technology to support health, in both clinical and business contexts. The team provided free short-term expertise and resources to public sector health and social care organisations to support AI projects and develop capability.

Nurses

Case study: Using AI to find optimal placement schedules for nursing students

How AI can be used to generate nursing placement schedules
repeated faces drawn on a wall

Case study: Creating synthetic data

How we generated mock data from real patient data, helping to reduce data privacy concerns
Ward staff at a desk

Case study: Bed management

An investigation into using AI to support bed allocation, with Kettering General Hospital
CT scan

Case study: CT scan alignment

This project with George Eliot Hospital involved experimenting with AI techniques to detect anomalies on CT scans
NHS staff making a bed

Case study: hospital long stays

How machine learning AI can help to identify the patients most at risk of long term hospital stays, giving early warning and supporting the potential for improved outcomes.
piles of papers

Case study: Negligence claims prediction project

Read about a project that explores how AI might help the NHS to understand and identify risk - preventing harm and saving valuable resources.

Case study: The Data Lens multiple language data search

This pilot project brings together health and social care data catalogues and metadata information from multiple databases into one easy search.

Case study: using deep learning to detect adrenal lesions in CT scans

This project investigated whether applying AI and deep learning could augment the detection of adrenal incidentalomas in CT scans.
Brain scan

Case study: identifying and quantifying Parkinson’s Disease using AI on brain slices

This project looked at approaches to enhance the identification of biomarkers, and explore whether automated identification of Parkinson’s Disease in these slices is possible.
Researcher

Case study: working with a Trusted Research Environment

This pilot examined using Trusted Research Environments to answer key and important questions for a defined project
Virtual workshop

Case study: Sharing AI skills and experience through deep dive workshops

This project explored the ethical and safety considerations of applying AI in their work with University Hospital Southampton.

Related Pages

The NHS AI Lab

The NHS AI Lab roadmap

AI Lab Virtual Hub community