New AI tool can spot heart disease five years before it develops

An exciting new AI took could help save lives by detecting fat around the heart which is invisible to the human eye. It can help doctors step in and stop heart failure five years before it develops.

Pioneering 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.

Experts say it means patients can be given an early warning by doctors, potentially stopping deadly heart attacks five years before they arrive.

The study found doctors armed with this crucial information can try to prevent heart failure from developing, or manage the condition in its earlier stages.

Researchers are now looking to roll the tool out across the NHS potentially saving thousands of lives.

Researchers from the University of Oxford developed the pioneering AI tool which examines routine heart CT scans to identify textural changes in the fat around the heart. These changes can indicate the heart muscle underneath is inflamed and unhealthy.

This 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 used on 72,000 patients across nine NHS Trusts 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. It said that researchers are now looking to roll the tool out across the NHS.

Around 350,000 patients are referred for a cardiac CT scan each year in the UK, so experts say the tool has the potential to have a big impact.

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."