Professor Andy Swift talks to BBC Scotland about AI and its use in medicine
20 May 2025
Professor Andy Swift, Honorary Consultant Radiologist, has featured on BBC Scotland talking about AI and its use in medicine.
It follows a medical breakthrough, led by the University of Dundee, which showed that MRI heart scans can spot heart disease risk 10 years early.
Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland Presenter Stephen Jardine on Friday 16th May, Professor Swift cited pioneering work led by clinicians and scientists from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Sheffield which uses AI to speed up the comparison of MRI heart scans, improving accuracy and patient care.
The innovation, which featured on BBC Panorama’s ‘Fixing the NHS: What Will it Take?’ earlier this year, undertakes a super-fast analysis of the heart’s function by automatically drawing around images of the heart’s complex structures when seen on MRI heart scans. This task – which would normally take a doctor 30 minutes to manually perform per scan – is rapidly undertaken by the AI, providing an accurate analysis within a couple of minutes and freeing up vital NHS resource that can be put back into direct patient care.
He also spoke of another advancement currently being trialled at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital which involves the use of AI to rapidly scan patients undergoing MRI heart scans.
“We can potentially collect a bit less raw data but still produce high quality accurate images which can make it cheaper,” he said. “It’s also great for patients who can’t lie still for long,”
The need for careful training and checking of AI in medicine by people who understand both medicine and data was paramount - with its future potential resting in its ability to support doctors to advance care.
“The important thing is AI only knows what we teach it. So, if we leave something out or if we teach it badly, then it will learn the wrong thing but by analysing very large groups of patients more rapidly it can potentially spot patterns that we would not otherwise have seen, more rapidly and in more detail. This could lead to further discoveries. So the future and potential of AI in medicine is by working with doctors to support us to do more thinking and discovering and advancing of practice.”
Listen again:
Mornings - with Stephen Jardine - BBC Sounds (starts 2.33 (Dundee University); 2.38 (Sheffield)
Read more:
- Sheffield AI heart disease innovation features on BBC Panorama
- AI heart disease technology scoops national win at NHS Parliamentary Awards
