Artificial intelligence tool detects often overlooked heart diseases

Smidt Heart Institute physician-scientists develop an algorithm that can spot difficult-to-diagnose cardiac conditions.
April 6, 2023

Physician-scientists in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai have created an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can effectively identify and distinguish between two life-threatening heart conditions that are often easy to miss: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and cardiac amyloidosis. The findings were published in JAMA Cardiology

The two-step, novel algorithm was used on over 34,000 cardiac ultrasound videos from Cedars-Sinai and Stanford Healthcare’s echocardiography laboratories. When applied to these clinical images, the algorithm identified specific features—related to the thickness of heart walls and the size of heart chambers—to efficiently flag certain patients as suspicious for having the potentially unrecognized cardiac diseases.

Cedars-Sinai release

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