Royal Papworth leads AI study into heart valve disease

Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is leading a study into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose heart valve disease. Royal Papworth is working with the University of Cambridge on the research, which hopes to develop a screening tool powered by AI to help diagnose the disease before symptoms are first displayed. The research will involve thousands of patients having four heart recordings that are collected via a Bluetooth stethoscope, in addition to the conventional route of an echocardiogram. Recordings will be uploaded to a machine-learning programme, so that the University of Cambridge can build an audio database of the noises associated with heart valve diseases. Ultimately, the research aims to create an artificially intelligent stethoscope that can analyse heart murmurs to provide either a diagnosis or determine if further investigation is needed.