Artificial intelligence could be used to diagnose heart attacks early

With this artificial intelligence-based algorithm, heart attacks could be diagnosed more accurately.

Heart attacks are one of the most common causes of death in today’s society, and they could end up being diagnosed faster and more accurately than ever thanks to artificial intelligence.

now a new study points that, compared to current testing methods, their new algorithm was able to rule out a heart attack in more than twice as many patients with 96.6% accuracy.

Specifically, it was a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh, who pointed out that this ability to rule out a heart attack could greatly reduce hospital admissions.

Currently, diagnosing a heart attack involves measuring levels of the protein troponin in the blood.

The bad thing is that the same threshold is used for all patients, so factors such as age or other health problems that affect troponin levels are not considered.

The researchers claim that their algorithm called CODE-ACS you can prevent errors with current diagnostics.

This algorithm was developed using data from 10,038 patients in Scotland who had come to hospital with a suspected heart attack.

This is how the algorithm works

To do this, the algorithm makes use of routinely collected patient information such as age, electrocardiogram findings and medical history, as well as troponin levels, to predict the likelihood that a person has had a heart attack.

“For patients with acute chest pain due to a heart attackEarly diagnosis and treatment save lives. Unfortunately, many conditions cause these common symptoms, and the diagnosis is not always easy. The use of data and the artificial intelligence to support clinical decisions has enormous potential to improve patient care and efficiencies in our busy emergency departments“, it states Nicholas Millswho led the investigation.

“Chest pain is one of the most common reasons people go to emergency departments. Every day, doctors around the world are faced with the challenge of separating patients whose pain is due to a heart attack from those whose pain is due to something less serious.“, Add Sir Nilesh Samanimedical director of the British Heart Foundation, which funded the research.