The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is to trial a 'superhuman' artificial intelligence (AI) model that predicts the risk of disease and early death in patients.
The technology is due to be trialled in NHS hospitals next year and is expected to be used across the health system within 5 years. It uses the readings of a common and inexpensive heart test to alert doctors to patients who may benefit from further tests or treatment, the Mirror reported.
From mid-2025, trials will take place at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, with other hospitals to be confirmed. The AI programme, known as AI-ECG risk estimation or Aire, is designed to read the results of electrocardiographic (ECG) tests, which record the electrical activity of the heart and are performed on patients suspected of having heart problems.
He then used these recordings to find problems in the structure of the heart that doctors could not see. Dr Arunashis Sau, a British Heart Foundation (BHF) clinical researcher at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London and cardiology registrar at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, said Aire's aim was not to develop something to replace doctors but to create something "superhuman".
"The aim is to try to use ECGs as a way of identifying people at higher risk who might benefit from other tests that would tell us more about what's going on," Sau said.
"An ECG is a very common and very inexpensive test, but it can be used to guide more detailed investigations that could change the way we manage patients, and potentially reduce the risk of something bad happening. One of the key distinctions is that the goal here was to do something that was superhuman - so not to replace or speed up something a doctor could do, but to do something a doctor couldn't do from looking at heart tracings," he added.
Asked what diseases can be caught early, Dr Sau said:
"For example, we can find that the pumping function of the heart is not working very well... heart failure. When the heart pump is not working as well as it normally is. We could catch it early, put treatments in place that we know are very good for that condition to prevent people from being admitted to hospital. We know that starting these treatments early can be very beneficial to the life expectancy of patients." | BGNES
