Important: DART Programme Data Email Address Update
Thank you to all the sites which are sending data to the DART Programme. Please note that our email address is changing to DART@ouh.nhs.uk.
The previous account will continue to be monitored until the end of June 2025. After that, all data must be sent to DART@ouh.nhs.uk, as this account will no longer be in use.
If you have already sent data to the former account before the end of June 2025, we are processing it and it does not need to be re-sent.
Please do not send emails to both addresses—switching to the new address now will help us avoid duplicate processing.
Thank you for your cooperation.
DART Team
Update on the NHS Lung Cancer Screening Programme
The National Screening Committee has renamed the Total Lung Health Check programme, which is now known as the NHS Lung Cancer Screening Programme
In June 2023, the Westminster government announced the rollout of a national targeted lung cancer screening programme following a recommendation from the UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC).
Lung cancer screening aims to detect lung cancer sooner, often before symptoms develop and when treatment is more likely to be successful.
The name change is an important milestone in the scaling up and transformation of the TLHC initiative into this new national screening programme. The new name is consistent with the national NHS screening programmes and follows research that showed it would help improve understanding of the programme and its purpose.
So far, more than 1 million people have taken up their lung cancer screening invitations and screening has diagnosed more than 5,500 people with lung cancer. Over 75% of these lung cancers were found at an early stage (1 or 2), compared to less than 30% of lung cancers detected outside of screening.
Prof Fergus Gleeson (University of Oxford) and Dr Richard Lee (Royal Marsdon) represented the DART partnership at the Oxford Centre for Cancer Early Detection and Prevention (OxCODE) symposium
Their poster gave an up-date on the DART project
DART is a multi-collaborator research programme aiming to improve multiple facets of Lung Cancer Screening and provide a data set for future. It collects clinical metadata, CT scans, and pathology from participants in NHS England’s Targeted Lung Health Checks (TLHC) programme.
DART has Health Research Authority and Confidentiality Advisory Group approvals and has uniquely linked the data collected to Health Episode Statistics data, to enable long term outcome data to be collected.
The collection of this data has involved linking TLHCs and their associated Hospitals, Radiology and Pathology departments, and transferring the data into the Oxford University Hospital’s Secure Data Environment and to academic and commercial collaborators.
DART is now linked to 14 TLHCs, and 3 further sites are in the process of linking. It has curated 245,160 participants post opt-out, and has currently, 114,598 CT scans, and 1,434 digital pathology samples and is increasing weekly.
The DART dataset is enabling development, testing and validation of Artificial Intelligence algorithms that improve the selection of participants for LCS, detection of pulmonary nodules and lung cancers on CT scans, diagnosis of lung cancer and subtyping on digital pathology images, and prognostic algorithms to determine the need for neoadjuvant or adjuvant treatment post resection.
Active data enrichment by learning what to annotate in digital pathology
Abstract: Our work aims to link pathology with radiology with the goal to improve the early detection of lung cancer. Rather than utilising a set of predefined radiomics features, we propose to learn a new set of features from histology. Generating a comprehensive lung histology report is the first vital step towards this goal. Deep learning has revolutionised the computational assessment of digital pathology images. Today, we have mature algorithms for assessing morphological features at the cellular and tissue levels. In addition, there are promising efforts that link morphological features with biologically relevant information. While promising, these efforts mostly focus on narrow well-defined questions. Developing a comprehensive report that is required in our setting requires an annotation strategy that captures all clinically relevant patterns specified in the WHO guidelines. Here, we propose and compare approaches aimed to balance the dataset and mitigate the biases in learning by automatically prioritising regions with clinical patterns underrepresented in the dataset. Our study demonstrates the opportunities active data enrichment can provide and results in a new lung-cancer dataset annotated to a degree that is not readily available in public domain.
Comparing imaging techniques to diagnose lung cancer – looking for advisors
Are you interested in helping research to improve accuracy in earlier diagnosis of lung cancer from different imaging types?
We’re looking for people who’ve had imaging for suspected lung cancer whether or not they’ve gone on to be diagnosed, as well as those who’ve been diagnosed and treated.
What is it for?
A group led by the University of Oxford is planning a research study exploring whether a CT scan can diagnose lung cancer earlier than the chest x-ray currently performed when lung cancer is suspected. As part of this research, the team is inviting people to join a patient and public involvement (PPI) advisory group.
What is the purpose of the PPI advisory group?
The group’s purpose is to ensure the experiences and views of those referred for chest imaging for suspected lung cancer, and those diagnosed with lung cancer or their family members/carers are taken into account when planning and delivering this study.
What would PPI advisory group members be expected to do?
PPI Group members will be asked to attend up to 3 workshops, review documents being designed for study participants, join a study steering committee and help share the final study results. You can choose to take part in all or some of these activities.
Timeline/tenure
The first workshop is expected to be held in June/July 2023 during the preparation of the final funding application to the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
If funded, the study will start early 2024 and there will be an opportunity to continue participation in the PPI advisory group at that point.
Remuneration
You will receive payment for any time spent in these activities and travel expenses for any face to face meetings, although most of the work will be completed remotely.
If you are interested and would like more information please contact dart@oncology.ox.ac.uk
CanPredict: Lung cancer risk prediction
A team of researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Nottingham have developed a new tool, called ‘CanPredict’, able to identify the people most at risk of developing lung cancer over the next 10 years, and put them forward for screening tests earlier, saving time, money and, most importantly, lives.
The ‘CanPredict’ tool has used anonymised health records of over 19 million adults from across the UK, and has the potential substantially to reduce the burden on NHS staff, saving time, money and streamlining the administrative process for better patient experience.
DART researcher, Dr Weiqi Liao, lead author on the publication and a data scientist in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, said: ‘Our tool, CanPredict, works by examining existing patient health records, so it could be run on a per GP surgery basis or nationally, automatically and objectively prioritising patients and alerting their GPs that they might benefit from further screening.
‘Because of this, CanPredict has the potential to substantially reduce the burden on NHS staff, saving time, money and streamlining the administrative process for better patient experience.’
Read the full University of Oxford press release here and the article here.
Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Royal Brompton & Harefield Clinical Group, Part of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust
We have received:
92,454 clinical records
902 CTs
81 patient’s pathology slides which have been scanned
SCOOT, DART’s companion project, has collected 94 blood samples.
Have your say
The DART project is about using data to better predict lung cancer so it can be treated earlier.
The project invites those in any way affected by lung cancer or lung cancer screening to advise us on the best ways to tell those attending lung cancer screening how their data is being used. We are planning to hold an advisory focus group by video conference on Wednesday 23rd November and invite those whose lives have been affected in any way by lung cancer to join us. Your input will make a valuable contribution to the project by ensuring we are clear about what data is collected and how it is used. If you are interested, please email DART Lung Health Project dart@oncology.ox.ac.uk.
The NHS Lung Health Check is a service that is running in some parts of England. It aims to help diagnose lung cancer at an earlier stage when treatment may be more successful.
People are invited for a lung health check if they:
are aged between 55 and 75
are registered with a GP
have ever smoked
live in an area where the checks are being done
Those at a higher risk of lung cancer have a CT scan. If the scan shows any abnormal areas (nodules), there may be further scans, tissue samples or surgery. This is to check if the area is cancer or not. In most cases it isn’t but in a small number of people it is.
DART researchers want to use information from scans and other test to further improve the early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer, leading to better survival rates.
This study is collecting and using data (clinical records and copies of scans and biopsy/resection slides) from over 500,000 participants in these lung health checks. We ask you to advise us on how you feel about DART collecting data after patient treatment and without direct consent, if the documents provided to patients make it clear enough how to request not to be included in the study and how you feel about commercial companies using the data to develop methods to improve recognition of lung diseases. Copies of the documents will be circulated to those interested before the meeting.
National lung cancer screening
The UK National Screening Committee has today recommended the introduction of targeted lung cancer screening.
Targeted screening for lung cancer is recommended for people aged 55 to 74 identified as being at high risk of lung cancer. Evidence shows that screening with low-dose computed tomography:
reduces lung cancer mortality
is acceptable to patients and professionals if adequately resourced and quality assured
DART has been working with NHSE sites which have piloted Targeted Lung Health Checks. Their success has led to this extension of the programme to all the four UK nations. As one example, the Doncaster programme has been operational since mid-March 2021 and in the first year 11,857 lung health check calls and more than 5,000 initial scans have taken place; 50 previously unknown lung cancers have been found, 73% of which were early-stage lung cancers. Seven other cancers have also been confirmed and 41 patients (75%) have been given life-saving cancer treatment so far.
DART will be working with lung health check sites to collect and use data to develop artificial intelligence methods to further improve early detection and thus lead to earlier and more successful treatment.
Read the UK NSC announcement here and the response from the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation here.
Presentation at OxCODE Symposium
Dr Weiqi Liao presented a Lightning Talk at the OxCODE (Oxford Centre for Early Cancer Detection) symposium 2022 on Tuesday 13th September 2022 at Worcester College. His talk was entitled “Predicting the future risk of lung cancer: Development and validation of QCancer2 (10-year risk) lung model and evaluating the performance of nine prediction models”