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.