Artificial intelligence can now warn critical care doctors that their patients are at risk of developing severe kidney damage up to two days early, with the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

The machine-learning model was developed jointly by DeepMind Health, a division of Google, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), a federal agency that provides healthcare services to military veterans across the US.

Acute kidney injury affects up to one in five patients admitted to hospitals in both the UK and US, and is responsible for an estimated 1.4m deaths per year. Patients with AKI are unable to process and remove waste as a result of sudden kidney failure, which occurs as a common hospital complication of anything from surgery to infection.