AI-enhanced ECGs may soon assess overall health

An electrocardiogram, also known as an ECG or EKG, is a painless, simple test that records the electrical activity of a person's heart. A recent paper in the journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, describes how the team developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to predict sex and estimate age from ECG data. The researchers, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, in Rochester, MN, trained the AI tool, which is of a type known as a convolutional neural network (CNN), using ECG readouts from nearly 500,000 individuals. When they tested the CNN's accuracy on a further 275,000 people, they found that it was very good at predicting sex but less good at predicting age. The AI tool got the sex right 90% of the time but only got the age right 72% of the time.