Researchers in the US have developed an AI tool that may help clinicians predict whether a patient will have a heart attack.
The tool, created by a team at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, accurately predicted which patients would have a heart attack within five years based on the composition of plague in the arteries.
The research findings are published in The Lancet Digital Health.
A build-up of plaque can cause the arteries supplying blood to the heart to narrow, increasing the likelihood of a heart attack.
Coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) takes 3D images of the region to help doctors estimate how much of a patient’s arteries have narrowed.
The new AI tool provides a quick and simple method for measuring the plaque visible in these images.
Damini Dey, PhD, director of the quantitative image analysis lab in the Biomedical Imaging Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the study, said:
“Coronary plaque is often not measured because there is not a fully automated way to do it.
“When it is measured, it takes an expert at least 25 to 30 minutes, but now we can use this program to quantify plaque from CTA images in five to six seconds.”
The researchers analysed CTA images from 1,196 people who underwent a coronary CTA at 11 sites across Australia, Germany, Japan, Scotland and the US.
They trained the AI algorithm to measure plaque using previously-analysed coronary CTA images from 921 people.
The algorithm works by first outlining the coronary arteries in 3D images, then identifying the blood and plaque deposits within the coronary arteries.
The tool’s measurements corresponded with plaque amounts seen in the coronary CTAs.
They also matched with images from intravascular ultrasound and catheter-based coronary angiography.
Finally, the researchers discovered that measurements made by the AI algorithm from CTA images accurately predicted heart attack risk within five years for 1,611 people who were part of the multicentre SCOT-HEART trial.
Dey said:
“More studies are needed, but it’s possible we may be able to predict if and how soon a person is likely to have a heart attack based on the amount and composition of the plaque imaged with this standard test.”
