Imperial College London has partnered with the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) to develop AI support systems for paediatric intensive care.
The collaboration aims to help paediatric doctors make complex decisions and provide faster, more precise treatment advice for critically ill children, to enhance patient care.
The initiative involves researchers and clinicians from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering, Department of Computing, and Department of Surgery and Cancer.
The team, led by Imperial Global USA human and artificial intelligence academic theme lead Aldo Faisal, is working alongside data scientists and clinicians at CHOC.
Aldo Faisal said: “The gold-standard for developing and evaluating patient-ready AI technology are multi-centre international trials.
“This UK and US partnership and collaboration allow us to make our AI Clinician system smarter so that it can help children with a much broader diversity of conditions and medical backgrounds.”
The AI Clinician model developed by Imperial leverages advanced algorithms to offer personalised recommendations by considering the full complexity of a patient’s health.
The partnership has integrated 36,000 anonymised records from CHOC with 20,000 anonymised NHS patient records, creating the largest international paediatric dataset.
Researchers are focusing on standardising drug dosages and adjusting data recorded at irregular intervals to fit the hourly format necessary for AI training.
CHOC clinicians collaborate with Imperial’s data scientists to ensure the AI models are reliable and robust in their individualised decision-making processes.
The collaboration builds on previous successes in using the AI Clinician model for adult sepsis treatment and AI-guided ventilation management, trialled in London hospitals.
The research also involves partnerships with other US-based hospitals and healthcare systems, including Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, and Sentara Healthcare.
CHOC chief scientific officer Terence Sanger said: “The partnership between CHOC and Imperial College London seeks to advance the use of artificial intelligence in paediatrics.
“This initiative reflects CHOC’s broader commitment to harnessing AI to transform children’s health.
“By enabling earlier detection and prediction of critical clinical events, as well as identifying optimal treatment strategies, we aim to significantly improve outcomes and deliver more personalized, data-driven care to every child we serve.”
Imperial’s centre for paediatrics and child health deputy director Padmanabhan Ramnarayan said: “We are excited about our transatlantic paediatric critical care data collaboration between Imperial and Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC).
“By combining granular data from tens of thousands of children admitted to paediatric critical care units in the UK and USA, this effort has the potential to revolutionise care for sick children in the future.”
