When it is not playing videos games or conquering the world of Go, DeepMind Technologies Ltd. puts many of its machine learning resources toward improving healthcare, and today the Alphabet Inc.-owned company announced a new research partnership to fight breast cancer using artificial intelligence.

As part of the new partnership, DeepMind will be teaming with a group of health research institutions led by the Cancer Research U.K. Centre at Imperial College London, continuing DeepMind’s ongoing work with the U.K.’s National Health Service.

The goal behind the program is to explore new ways to improve breast cancer detection by applying machine learning to mammography, an x-ray technique commonly used to check breast health. DeepMind hopes to create machine learning models that can quickly and accurately examine mammograms for signs of cancer, helping doctors catch the disease early so that treatment can begin as soon as possible.

“Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence could enable us to address some of the biggest challenges in breast cancer research, including improving the accuracy of detection,” said Iain Foulkes, executive director of research and innovation at the Cancer Research U.K. Centre.”Too many cancers are detected at a late stage when they are more difficult to treat. This is why Cancer Research U.K. is building capacity, forging new partnerships, and supporting a community for early detection research so that more people might survive their disease.”

In addition to working with doctors and medical organizations, DeepMind will also team up with the AI health research team from its parent company, Alphabet-owned Google LLC, which has already done some of its own research into detecting breast cancer with machine learning. DeepMind said in a statement that this collaboration had been requested by its new partners, who wanted researchers from both DeepMind and Google “so that the project could take advantage of the AI expertise in both teams, as well as Google’s supercomputing infrastructure.”

DeepMind came under fire in the U.K. earlier this year for gaining “inappropriate” access to patients’ private health information, which spurred the company to create independent review panel to evaluate its practices. For the new partnership announced today, DeepMind said that it “is committed to treating the data for this project with the utmost care and respect.”

“As is standard practice, the data being used in the research remains in the full control of our partners, and is being stored to world-class standards of security and encryption,” DeepMind said in its statement. “Additionally, all medical information has been thoroughly de-identified, with any information that could identify an individual being removed before researchers can conduct their analysis.”

The research agreement among DeepMind, Google and the NHS is currently set for a 12-month period, but it can also be extended if the partners agree to it. As with its other health projects, DeepMind will publish all of its research for in peer-reviewed journals.

Image: DeepMind