Cancer Research Horizons and Royal Surrey partner with Health Triage to advance AI-enabled breast cancer screening
- 21 May 2025
Summary
- Cancer Research Horizons non-exclusively licenses data from the OPTIMAM Medical Image Database to enable Health Triage to develop an AI-based breast cancer screening tool
- Health Triage’s software solution aims to optimise radiology workflows and improve diagnostic accuracy by enabling the automatic identification of negative mammograms
Cancer Research Horizons and Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust have announced a collaboration with Health Triage, an Italian start-up specialising in AI for medical diagnostics, to advance breast cancer screening using data from the OPTIMAM Medical Image Database.
As part of the collaboration, Health Triage will use OPTIMAM data to train deep learning models to automatically identify mammograms that do not show signs of cancer. Triaging mammograms with a high likelihood of being negative can reduce the workload of radiologists by enabling them to initially focus on suspicious and high-risk cases.
Given that around 99.1% of screening mammograms in the UK return a negative result and the shortage of radiologists in many countries, the use of AI-based solutions has the potential to reduce healthcare resource use and optimise radiology workflows, while maintaining breast cancer detection rates.
The use of OPTIMAM data will also enable Health Triage to investigate whether models trained specifically as rule-out systems can achieve better specificity than a system trained for the purpose of cancer detection, which could help further improve screening programmes.
OPTIMAM is a centralised, continuously expanding database of approximately 7 million anonymised mammography images from over 465,000 clients collected from multiple NHS breast screening sites across the UK. Royal Surrey manages the OPTIMAM database and ongoing image collection with continued funding from Cancer Research UK. OPTIMAM data is available for academic and commercial research, subject to a data sharing agreement with Cancer Research Horizons and Royal Surrey. For further information on the access process, please visit the OPTIMAM website.
To ensure the clinical validation of Health Triage’s solution, the Italian Group for Mammography Screening (GISMa) will act as an independent body responsible for the scientific oversight of the project.
Tony Hickson, Chief Business Officer of Cancer Research Horizons, said: “Breast screening programmes are critical for the early detection of cancer and Health Triage’s use of OPTIMAM data has the potential to improve these while reducing the burden on healthcare systems. The AI revolution in healthcare relies on high-quality data, and this partnership would not be possible without Royal Surrey’s development and management of OPTIMAM, one of the largest and best-curated imaging databases available.”
Davide Dettori, CEO of Health Triage, said: “Artificial Intelligence is transforming the future of medical diagnostics. Our goal is to make breast cancer screening more accurate, widespread and accessible. Thanks to our collaboration with Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust and Cancer Research Horizons, the use OPTIMAM data, and the scientific support of GISMa, we are able to provide tangible support to radiologists and screening programmes – ultimately helping to save more lives.”
Louise Stead, Group Chief Executive of Royal Surrey and Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trusts said: “We are proud to support this important collaboration, which has the potential to make a real difference in how breast cancer is detected and diagnosed. The OPTIMAM database is one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of mammography images, and it’s exciting to see it powering innovation to help adopt AI into healthcare. This technology is intended to help patients to get the answers and care they need sooner and ultimately, save lives.”
This partnership aligns with Cancer Research Horizons’ Commercial Data Partnership Guiding Principles, ensuring safe and transparent use of patient-derived data with the primary aim of positive patient impact.
ENDS
About Cancer Research Horizons
Cancer Research Horizons is the innovation engine of Cancer Research UK – the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. It brings together world-leading minds, bold ideas and the right partners to bridge the gap between academic research and taking drugs to market. It focuses on the tougher, more profound ideas that can lead to true innovation, translating them into effective treatments and diagnostics for cancer patients.
To date, it has played an instrumental role in forming over 90 start-ups. It has helped bring 14 cancer drugs to market, borne out of Cancer Research UK's pioneering research. Through these drugs, it has enabled in excess of 6 million courses of treatment for cancer patients across the world.
With access to Cancer Research UK's network of 4,000 exceptional researchers, and £400m of annual research spend, it is a powerful partner in the fight to conquer cancer. By uniting its commercial partnerships and therapeutic innovation capabilities, Cancer Research Horizons is uniquely placed to support translational funding, entrepreneurial development, data licensing and collaboration, spin-out creation, and offer a full spectrum of drug discovery and clinical capabilities.
Every penny it makes goes back into funding the next bold steps, to help bring forward the day when all cancers are conquered.
For more information and to get in touch with the team, visit cancerresearchhorizons.com.
About Health Triage
Health Triage S.p.A. is an innovative start-up established at the beginning of 2020 and controlled by Fin Posillipo S.p.A., with additional participation from the ENEA Tech and Biomedical Foundation. Fin Posillipo S.p.A. oversees more than thirty companies, with offices in Italy and Spain, serving Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Far East and Oceania. The Group carries out research, development and marketing in the health sector, through subsidiaries, with a turnover of 800 million euros and more than 800 employees, offering direct support to Clinical Research Organization for clinical analyzes, research, scientific tests and preparatory activities for the launch of new products.
Health Triage aims to position itself at the epicenter of the data revolution in the medical sector. Today an impressive amount of data is generated, in the order of zettabytes (1 zettabyte corresponds to a trillion bytes), relating to diagnoses, therapeutic paths, drugs, medical devices, digital images, results of laboratory analyzes and much more. Research activities focus on the development of new screening protocols and innovative diagnosis processes, exploiting Deep Learning to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge by new technologies through data, algorithms and artificial neural networks.
The use of digital Health Triage systems in healthcare allows you to completely innovate diagnostic processes with the aim of supporting medical staff and healthcare facilities with technological tools, capable of increasing quality, precision medicine and efficiency. Current research activities mainly concern the development of new automatic diagnosis technologies for oncology with a particular focus on the prevention of breast and prostate cancer.
Health Triage intends to accelerate innovation through the use of new AI models that need a lot of data and, for this reason, is promoting the creation of one of the first Data Lakes for the collection of health data, anonymized and pseudonymized, to make them available, through interconnected and integrated systems, facilitating the continuous improvement of the capabilities of their technologies.
About Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust
Royal Surrey is an award-winning multi-site foundation trust, providing core general hospital services and community services to around half a million people. Our sites include Royal Surrey County Hospital, Haslemere Community Hospital, Milford Community Hospital and Cranleigh Village Hospital. We are also home to one of the country’s largest cancer centres, Royal Surrey Cancer Centre, which offers rapid diagnosis, advanced treatments and access to cutting edge research to patients across the south east.
Our 5,000 skilled and dedicated staff strive to deliver nationally celebrated, community focused health and care. We are also proud to have a number of world renowned experts on our team, including those leading the way in delivering ground-breaking minimal access and robotic surgery, as well as brachytherapy and molecular radiotherapy.
Last year they:
- Saw close to 90,000 patients in our Emergency Department;
- Helped more than 11,000 patients at our Minor Injuries Unit in Haslemere;
- Delivered 3,000 babies;
- Performed 34,000 surgical procedures;
- Completed 82,000 CT and MRI scans;
- Provided 423,000 outpatient appointments;
- Treated more than 8,000 cancer patients.
Our Maternity Services and Royal Surrey County Hospital as a whole are rated as ‘Outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Contacts
Tim Bodicoat
Content Manager
Cancer Research Horizons
[email protected]
Paolo Colantuoni / Francesco Signor
Media Relation
Health Triage
[email protected]