AI Can Detect Heart Disease – From X-Rays  

By Shlomo Maital

    The latest segment of the Science Friday podcast, with Ira Flatow, featured Dr. Eric Topol, Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, based in La Jolla, California.    [Translational research seeks to translate basic science discoveries more quickly and efficiently into practice]. 

      He recounted how AI has used chest X-Rays for a surprising purpose for which they were not intended – to detect early signs of heart disease.  

      “The fact that there are over 70 million chest X-rays in the United States each year alone– it’s incredible,”  Dr. Topol said. “So there’s all this free added information in those chest X-rays that could help us because most people don’t know their cardiovascular risk. And that’s important, especially for determining whether a person should take a statin, and whether it should be an intensive statin type of medication and dosage.”

   Topol recounted:  “…we can tell from other studies using the chest X-ray for this opportunistic detection that it can pick up the calcium score– what people can undergo a CT scan to see how much calcium they have in their coronary arteries. But that can also be derived from a chest X-ray, and that is an indicator of risk.   Also, the chest X-ray can through AI determine the heart strength– the so-called ejection fraction. So it’s picking up a bunch of things, as seen in other studies, that are very predictive of a person’s risk. And it must be the composite of these things.  But we really don’t know because, although the study really was extraordinary, it didn’t do enough as far as the explainability side of things.”

        AI also proved able to diagnose diabetes from X-Rays.  How?  “It basically did this so-called occlusion, or masking, where it would look at the chest X-ray and block out various regions to find out what was the source of the information that we can’t see. And it turned out it picked up the fat pads in the chest that was providing this diabetes possible diagnosis.”

         AI is exceptionally good at processing a huge mass of data, e.g. 70 million X-Rays, scanning every small detail in each, and then reaching conclusions that human eyes miss.  Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the world.  Perhaps some of those 70 million people X-rayed in the US will owe their lives and their health to Dr. AI.