Novel Artificial Intelligence Tool Identifies Hard-to-Miss Heart Conditions

Scientists from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can identify and distinguish between two life-threatening heart conditions that are often easy to miss--hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and cardiac amyloidosis. Their findings are published in JAMA Cardiology in a paper titled, "High-Throughput Precision Phenotyping of Left Ventricular Hypertrophy With Cardiovascular Deep Learning." "Early detection and characterization of increased left ventricular (LV) wall thickness can markedly impact patient care but is limited by under-recognition of hypertrophy, measurement error and variability, and difficulty differentiating causes of increased wall thickness, such as hypertrophy, cardiomyopathy, and cardiac amyloidosis," the researchers wrote. "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," explained 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."