Artificial intelligence can predict life expectancy of heart failure patients: Study

Researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can predict the life expectancy of heart failure patients, an advance that may allow clinicians to make more informed decisions while caring for heart patients. The researchers, including those from the University of California (UC) at San Diego in the US, said while predicting mortality is important in patients with heart failure, current strategies for evaluating this risk are only modestly successful and can be subjective. They developed a risk score that determined low- and high-risk of death by identifying eight variables collected from the majority of patients with heart failure. Using these inputs, the researchers said, the newly developed model could accurately predict life expectancy 88 per cent of the time, and performed substantially better than other popular published models. "This tool gives us insight, for example, on the probability that a given patient will die from heart failure in the next three months or a year," said Eric Adler, co-author of the study from UC San Diego.