BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
In a trial of 67,000 patients, an AI tool identified heart failure in up to 81 percent of cases and heart valve disease in up to 90 percent, all from a standard electrocardiogram (ECG): a test that has been in clinical use for a century but, until now, couldn’t tell you whether someone had either condition.
The tool came out of Imperial College London with funding from the British Heart Foundation, and was presented at the European Society of Cardiology annual congress in Munich. It runs in under two seconds.
The gap the AI targets
ECGs are among the most common tests in medicine, with roughly one billion performed worldwide each year. They capture the heart’s electrical activity, rate and rhythm, and they’ve long been the go-to for spotting heart attacks and abnormal rhythms. What they can’t do is detect heart failure or heart valve disease. For that, patients need an echocardiogram, an ultrasound scan, and in most health systems they wait months for one after being referred.
Running on existing ECG data, the tool identifies patients most likely to have one of those conditions so they can be moved up the queue for echocardiograms rather than waiting on a general list.
What the trial proved
Trained on millions of patient records, the tool pulls information from ECG signals that falls outside what the human eye typically picks up. In the 67,000-patient US trial, it caught up to 81 percent of heart failure cases and up to 90 percent of heart valve disease cases.
It can’t definitively diagnose or rule out either condition, but it’s a strong enough signal that clinicians can use it to decide who needs faster follow-up. Professor Fu Siong Ng of Imperial College London also pointed to a broader application: running the model across all ECGs performed in a hospital, including those ordered for entirely different reasons. “The AI model could be run on all ECGs done in a hospital to flag those at highest risk of these diseases, so that they can be diagnosed earlier,” he said.
Dr. Sonya Babu-Narayan, consultant cardiologist and clinical director of the British Heart Foundation, said the tool “could be a solution to help fast-track the patients who are most likely to have a heart abnormality. When it comes to the heart, earlier diagnosis and treatment saves and improves lives.”
Why earlier diagnosis is so important
Both conditions are treatable, and earlier treatment tends to go better. Patients identified before things deteriorate have more options than those who get a diagnosis after months on a waiting list. Dr. Ahmed El-Medany, the BHF clinical research fellow who led the Imperial College analysis, said the next step is designing handheld AI-driven ECG readers for healthcare professionals to use in the field.
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