Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many NHS cancer trusts are (a) delivering radiotherapy contouring planning manually and (b) using AI auto contouring for radiotherapy.

NHS England undertook a baseline assessment of artificially intelligent (AI) auto-contouring systems in summer 2024 which indicated that, at that time, 39 trusts had some AI arrangements in place.

The use of AI auto contouring technology to plan for treatments is not always suitable, useful, or available for all areas of the body, therefore, the actual percentage of cases where AI technology was used is not known.