Artificial intelligence interprets heart scans to assess mortality risks

Researchers at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS) have for the first time used machine learning to interpret heart scans, to predict how long patients will live.

The research, published in the journal Radiology, found that the AI software could predict survival at one year with up to 80 per cent accuracy, according to Declan O’Regan, who led the project.

“We studied patients with pulmonary hypertension, which is a devastating disease that causes heart failure, where pressure builds up in the blood vessels of the lungs and then feeds back into the heart,” said O’Regan. “It can cause about one third of people to die within five years of diagnosis,” he said.

The key to treating the disease is to identify which patients are at greatest risk of developing heart failure, so that they can be targeted with the most intensive treatment, he said. However, predictions made today are often inaccurate.