Hollywood Diagnostics Center is excited to share the news that soon, by using artificial intelligence, EKGs may soon be able to screen for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an underdiagnosed condition that interferes with the heart’s ability to function properly.
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a condition where the heart’s walls thicken and make it harder for the heart to pump blood. It often doesn’t cause symptoms, and patients sometimes are unaware that they even have it until they experience complications. The condition is the leading cause of death in adolescents and young adults playing sports. This means that early detection is critical.
What Was Discovered
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic developed an AI method for earlier diagnosis through an EKG. The team trained and validated a convolutional neural network using digital 12-lead EKG from 2,448 patients known to have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 51,153 who did not, matching control subjects for age and sex. The group then tested the AI’s ability to detect the disease on a different group of 612 subjects with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 12,788 control subjects.
“The good performance in patients with a normal EKG is fascinating. It’s interesting to see that even a normal EKG can look abnormal to a convolutional neural network. This supports the concept that these networks find patterns that are hiding in plain sight,” said Peter Noseworthy, MD, Mayo Clinic cardiologist and senior author on the study.
Researchers tested the AI on different subgroups. For a cohort of patients diagnosed with left ventricular hypertrophy, a disease caused high blood pressure that is also characterized by heart wall thickening, the algorithm achieved an area under the curve of 0.95. In the subgroup of patients with only normal EKGs, the AI also had an area under the curve of 0.95.
In a subgroup of patients diagnosed with aortic stenosis, a condition characterized by a narrowing of the valve, the AI achieved an area under the curve of 0.94. The algorithm performed similarly well in a subset of patients who had been genetically tested and confirmed to have pathogenic mutations for the disease.
While the AI tool achieved high levels of accuracy in determining which patients had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the researchers noted that further study is required before it can be used in clinical settings.
The team plans to test the algorithm in other adult populations, children, and adolescents to discover where it is successful and where it fails.
Hollywood Diagnostics Center has been recognized as a leader in the medical diagnostics field while performing over 30,000 diagnostic procedures annually. This includes the echocardiograms discussed in this article. The center continues to be at the forefront of medical technology by progressively updating its equipment and procedures to reflect the latest advances in medicine. HDC is your complete, one source provider of all diagnostic services.
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