New AI Tool Detects Often Overlooked Heart Diseases

"These two heart conditions are challenging for even expert cardiologists to accurately identify, and so patients often go on for years to decades before receiving a correct diagnosis," said David Ouyang, MD, a cardiologist in the Smidt Heart Institute and senior author of the study. "Our AI algorithm can pinpoint disease patterns that can't be seen by the naked eye, and then use these patterns to predict the right diagnosis." 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. "The algorithm identified high-risk patients with more accuracy than the well-trained eye of a clinical expert," said Ouyang.