When people seek emergency care for shortness of breath, a routine electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) is better than standard blood tests at determining if the cause is heart failure, according to new research published today in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, an American Heart Association journal. "Determining why someone has shortness of breath is challenging for emergency department physicians, and this AI-enabled ECG provides a rapid and effective method to screen these patients for left ventricular systolic dysfunction," said Demilade Adedinsewo, M.D., M.P.H., lead author of the study and chief fellow in the division of cardiovascular medicine at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. The left ventricle supplies most of the heart's pumping power, so it is larger than the other chambers and essential for normal function. In left ventricular systolic dysfunction (LVSD), the left ventricle is weakened and must work harder to maintain adequate blood flow to the body. In a typical year, about 1.2 million people go to emergency departments because they are short of breath.

When people seek emergency care for shortness of breath, a routine electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) is better than standard blood tests at determining if the cause is heart failure, according to new research published today in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, an American Heart Association journal. "Determining why someone has shortness of breath is challenging for emergency department physicians, and this AI-enabled ECG provides a rapid and effective method to screen these patients for left ventricular systolic dysfunction," said Demilade Adedinsewo, M.D., M.P.H., lead author of the study and chief fellow in the division of cardiovascular medicine at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. The left ventricle supplies most of the heart's pumping power, so it is larger than the other chambers and essential for normal function. In left ventricular systolic dysfunction (LVSD), the left ventricle is weakened and must work harder to maintain adequate blood flow to the body. In a typical year, about 1.2 million people go to emergency departments because they are short of breath.

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.