Rinchi
TechInAfrica – The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has increased for the past few years. Many organizations across different disciplines have been using AI to increase efficiency as well as profitability. Now that AI has also been used in the healthcare sector, helping to improve health services for patients.
Recently, researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK have used AI to detect a risk of a heart attack five years before it strikes. They developed a new biomarker that can detect changes to blood vessels supplying the heart. The technology can identify “biological red flags” like inflammation, scarring, and new blood vessel formation that can lead to a heart attack.
The technology is described as a fingerprint to detect the red flags around people’s arteries. By doing this, we can detect early signs of diseases so that we can do some preventative steps before a heart attack strikes which eventually will save lives.
The findings were presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress in Paris, France and are published in the European Heart Journal. According to the researchers, they plan to make the technology available for health professionals over the next year.
Metin Avkiran, BHF Associate Medical Director commented on the research, “This research is a powerful example of how innovative use of machine learning technology has the potential to revolutionize how we identify people at risk of a heart attack and prevent them from happening.
“This is a significant advance. The new ‘fingerprint’ extracts additional information about underlying biology from scans used routinely to detect narrowed arteries. Such AI-based technology to predict an impending heart attack with greater precision could represent a big step forward in personalized care for people with suspected coronary artery disease,” Avkiran concluded.
Source: techcentral.co.za
