TL;DR

NICE published draft guidance on 23 October recommending five AI technologies as options for the NHS to help radiologists find prostate cancer on MRI scans. Use would be tied to a two-year evidence-generation period, because the committee judged the current evidence limited and inconsistent. Two further products were turned down for lack of any clinical or cost-effectiveness data.

What NICE recommends

The recommended five are QP-Prostate, ProstatID, DeepHealth Prostate, Prostate Intelligence (Pi) and AI-Rad Companion Prostate MR. Each marks regions of a prostate MRI where cancer may be present, assigns a risk classification and gives the radiologist supporting information. The committee declined to back mdprostate or hProstate.

NICE’s independent committee said the technology could make MRI reading more accurate and consistent, especially where specialist expertise is scarce. It still wants NHS data on how accurate the tools are, what happens to patients, workflow, costs and how the tools perform across different patient groups.

Every scan would still be read by a radiologist. Dr Anastasia Chalkidou, who leads NICE’s HealthTech programme, described the tools as “a second pair of eyes”, and the NHS’s national cancer director, Professor Peter Johnson, said “the technology supports our expert staff but does not replace them”.

Why it matters

Demand for prostate MRI has risen, NICE says, putting pressure on radiology departments, and in 2023 England recorded over 58,000 new diagnoses of the disease. James Frith, the health innovation minister, called the recommendation an example of “smart, safe adoption of AI”.

Patient-facing tools are arriving too. In Wales, Prostate Cymru has started offering an online “AI doctor”, which the charity describes as a UK first; 160 men tried it during its opening week, it told the news site Wales247. The charity says the tool is built on current NICE and NHS Wales guidelines, among others, and is monitored by specialist consultants and nurses; the Wales247 report cites no independent evaluation.

Looking forward

The draft guidance and its evidence generation plan are open for consultation, and the committee will weigh responses before publishing final guidance. In our view, the conditional route is the right one: approving tools for use while the evidence is collected gets them into hospitals sooner, but it only works if trusts actually record the outcome data NICE says is missing.