This is Your Future Health Care on AI
By Sarah C.P. Williams, Portraits by Jorg Meyer, Illustration by Davide Bonazzi
Several years ago, cardiologist Pierre Elias, MD, was working overnight in a cardiac intensive care unit when he was called by another hospital’s emergency room about a man complaining of shortness of breath and chest tightness. Three months prior, he had presented with the same symptoms. A quick EKG displaying the heart’s electrical activity as squiggles and lines showed nothing abnormal, and the emergency room had sent the man home with the good news that he was not having a heart attack.
On the night Dr. Elias answered the call, the man had returned to the emergency room, but this time he could barely breathe and doctors quickly put him on a ventilator. An ultrasound revealed that the valves in his heart were severely diseased and could no longer open and shut correctly—a problem with the heart’s structure rather than its electrical activity.
“If he had been diagnosed with valvular disease the first time he came in, he could have had a procedure to fix it,” says Dr. Elias. “But by the time he came back, he was already in multi-organ failure.”
The man died, but his story has stuck with Dr. Elias, assistant professor of cardiology and biomedical informatics and medical director for artificial intelligence at NewYork-Presbyterian. Patients like that man inspired Dr. Elias and his colleagues to turn to artificial intelligence to analyze routine EKGs and chest X-rays to predict whether patients are at a high risk of structural heart defects and need further tests.
“Even though I’ve looked at 15,000 electrocardiograms in the last decade, there are still pieces of information, such as structural disease, that I can’t interpret from them,” says Dr. Elias. “It turns out that an AI model can do it with a much higher degree of accuracy than me or any other cardiologist.”
