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.