28 March 2019
Institute news
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) could be harnessed to improve the diagnosis of heart disease, reduce the cost of heart imaging, and enhance patient care, according to a key paper published by a group of international collaborators led by the Baker Institute’s Professor Tom Marwick.
In the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), Professor Marwick outlines how AI is likely to be particularly useful in the near future when it comes to disease classification, diagnostic support, and image interpretation.
He says AI is likely to provide a process to improve speed and quality of heart imaging and to allow prompt diagnoses, which in turn would improve workflow and patient care. But he warns, it does come with its challenges.
Cardiologists must, for example, consider the questions that these techniques are applied to in order to determine what outcome needs to be achieved for patients. And many would agree that automatic generation of decisions is less desirable than a human who engages with the clinical, personal, environmental, and social aspects of each individual.
In the near future, therefore, the value adding potential of AI is most likely to be as intelligent, precision medicine tools for imaging specialists and clinicians.
This supports our move away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach, as the Institute seeks to build expertise to harness new technologies in order to bring a precision medicine approach to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiometabolic disease.