The National Health Service (NHS) England will trial a combination of AI and robot-assisted care to speed up the detection and diagnosis of lung cancer, the UK’s most lethal form of the disease. The trial comes at the same time as the health service pledges to offer all smokers and ex-smokers the chance to be screened for lung cancer by 2030. The disease is a particular focus of the government’s forthcoming national cancer plan for England because it is Britain’s biggest cancer killer, reflecting historically high smoking rates. NHS chiefs hope that deploying AI and robotic technology will help doctors uncover more cases, which will enable treatment to start sooner and enhance the patient’s chances of survival. NHS England said that if proven effective, the technology could help transform lung cancer diagnosis as the screening programme increasingly identifies more people with very small nodules that would previously have gone undetected until much later.