A team of scientists and clinicians at Scripps Research has found that the heart conditions, such as heart attacks and heart rhythm disturbances, can be diagnosed by relying on just three electrodes and AI tools.
Clinicians usually use 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) to detect the heart’s electrical activity. But these ECGs cannot be performed by all clinicians as it requires specialized equipment and expertise.
In a study “npj Digital Medicine”, the scientists reported that with only three ECG leads, AI algorithm can recreate full 12 lead ECGs. Clinicians were able to detect heart attacks with almost the same level of accuracy as traditional 12-lead ECGs when they examined AI-generated ECGs.
This new approach will pave the way to more accessible and affordable heart monitoring with guaranteed accuracy. Not all healthcare facilities have the expertise and equipment required for the standard 12-Lead ECGs. This new approach can save more lives by giving high quality heart diagnostics to patients.
Dr. Evan Muse, lead of cardiovascular genomics at Scripps Research Translational Institute, said that, “This opens up the door to patients being able to get really high-quality, time-sensitive clinical data without traveling to somewhere that has a 12-lead ECG. It likely means not only increased access to ECG technology, but decreased costs and improved patient safety.”
The research team collected more than 600000 12-lead ECGs from patients to train the AI tool. Half of the ECGs had normal rhythms while the rest showed a variety of heart conditions, ensuring that AI could handle diverse scenarios.
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Girorgie Quer, Director of artificial intelligence at Scripps Research Translational Institute, stated that, “We knew that leads are somehow related. Deep learning algorithms allowed us to process a very large dataset and understand these relationships among the leads, enabling the reconstruction of the full 12-lead. We started out hoping to get a full reconstruction from just limb leads, because those are the easiest for non-specialists to set up. But we found that we got much better data when we added a chest lead as well.”
Although the results are promising, researchers emphasize that more studies are needed before relying them in clinic .In future, research will be conducted on another set of patients in different clinical setting to ensure its reliability.
Eric Topol, MD, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and executive vice president of Scripps Research, commented that, “This is an optimal case for AI taking a few leads of the (12-lead) electrocardiogram to make it remarkably informative, which has big practical implications for patients in the future,”
This research contributes to the growing trend of using AI for cardiovascular care. “This new work is just one example of how we can use AI to enable things that we could never do in the past,” added Quer.
