LONDON: Artificial intelligence (AI) can detect fat around the heart which is invisible to the human eye and predict a person’s risk of heart failure five years before it develops, according to a new study.
Experts said it could mean that doctors could try and prevent heart failure from developing, or manage the condition in its earlier stages.
Researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK developed the pioneering AI tool which examines routine heart CT scans to identify textural changes in the fat around the heart that indicate the heart muscle underneath is inflamed and unhealthy.
The changes cannot be spotted by doctors through any routine medical imaging tests, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) – which funded the study, said.
AI analysis of these scans can warn doctors when a patient is at high risk of heart failure, which means the heart is unable to pump blood around the body properly.
The tool was trained and validated on 72,000 patients in England who had cardiac CT scans between 2007 and 2022.
The new study, which has been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that those deemed to be in the highest risk group were 20 times more likely to develop heart failure than those in the lowest risk group.
High-risk patients had a one in four chance of developing heart failure within five years, researchers found.
The BHF said that until now, there has been no way to accurately predict who may develop heart failure this way.
The charity said that the algorithm was found to predict the risk that a person developed heart failure in the next five years with 86% accuracy.
Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, clinical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Heart failure is consistently diagnosed too late, sometimes only when a patient is admitted to hospital.
"Late diagnosis may mean patients already have severe damage to their heart muscle which might have been avoided.
"This tool could help doctors spot heart failure earlier, by monitoring more closely those at highest risk.
"Early heart failure diagnosis is crucial - it means doctors can better manage someone’s condition, which gives them a fighting chance of living longer in better health.
"This study demonstrates the power of harnessing technology to unlock improvements in cardiovascular care.”
Professor Charalambos Antoniades, British Heart Foundation professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Oxford – who led the research, said: "We have used developments in bioscience and computing to take a big step forward in treating heart failure.
"Our new AI tool is able to take cardiac CT scan data and produce an absolute risk score for each patient without any need for human input.
"Although this study used cardiac CT scans, we are now working towards applying this method to any CT scan of the chest, performed for any reason.
"This will allow doctors to make more informed decisions about the best way to treat patients, giving the most intensive treatment to those at the highest risk.
"We hope that, if this programme is rolled out nationwide, it could reduce hospital pressures by helping patients live well for longer.” – dpa
