British Heart Foundation funds AI to predict heart disease risk

Artificial intelligence could soon be used to predict a patient's future risk of heart attack or stroke. A team at the University of Cambridge are developing a machine learning tool that helps predict people's risk based on their health records, thanks to joint funding from the British Heart Foundation and the Alan Turning Institute. Researchers plan to use the long-term health records of over two million people in the UK to develop the algorithm. But these calculators only take into account a patient's health at the time it is used, rather than including their medical and family history. They also don't account for how a patient's risk factors have changed over time or differentiate the risk by specific heart and circulatory diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes, heart failure or abnormal heart rhythms.