AI can beat doctors in predicting heart attack

Artificial intelligence-based systems can predict death and heart attack in patients suffering from chest pain with greater accuracy than humans, says a new study.

Doctors use risk scores to make treatment decisions, but these scores are based on just a handful of variables and often have modest accuracy in individual patients.

Through repetition and adjustment, machine learning, the bedrock of AI, could exploit large amounts of data and identify complex patterns that might not be evident to humans, said the study presented at the International Conference on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT (ICNC) 2019 in Portugal.

"Doctors already collect a lot of information about patients, for example those with chest pain. We found that machine learning can integrate these data and accurately predict individual risk. This should allow us to personalise treatment and ultimately lead to better outcomes for patients," said study author Luis Eduardo Juarez-Orozco of the Turku PET Centre in Finland.

The study enrolled 950 patients with chest pain. During an average six-year follow-up there were 24 heart attacks and 49 deaths from any cause.

A machine learning algorithm called LogitBoost repeatedly analysed 85 variables in the 950 patients with known six-year outcomes.

With these analysis, the algorithm "learned" how imaging data interacts and then identified patterns correlating the variables to death and heart attack with more than 90 per cent accuracy.

"The algorithm progressively learns from the data and after numerous rounds of analyses, it figures out the high dimensional patterns that should be used to efficiently identify patients who have the event. The result is a score of individual risk," Juarez-Orozco said.

--IANS

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