RESEARCHERS at an Oxford hospital have developed artificial intelligence (AI) that can diagnose scans for heart disease and lung cancer.

Currently cardiologists can tell from the timing of the heartbeat in scans if there is a problem. But even the best doctors get it wrong in one in five cases. Patients are either sent home and have a heart attack or they undergo an unnecessary operation.

An artificial intelligence system developed at the John Radcliffe Hospital in the United Kingdom diagnoses heart scans much more accurately. It can pick up details in the scans that doctors can’t see.

It then gives a recommendation: positive, which means that it believes there is a risk of the patient having a heart attack, or negative.

The system has been tested in clinical trials in six cardiology units. The results are due to be published this year in a peer-reviewed journal after they have been checked by experts, but Prof. Paul Leeson, a cardiologist who developed the system, says that the data indicates that the system has greatly outperformed his fellow heart specialists.

The system, called Ultromics, was trained to identify potential problems by being fed the scans of 1,000 patients who Leeson had treated over the past seven years, along with information about whether they went on to have heart problems.

Another AI system is looking for signs of lung cancer. It searches for large clumps of cells called nodules. Doctors can’t tell whether these clumps are harmless or will go on to become cancerous and so patients need to have several more scans to see how the nodules develop.

However, clinical trials have shown that this AI system can rule out the harmless cases — saving patients several months of anxiety. It can also diagnose lung cancer much earlier.

The system is being commercialized by a British startup company called Optellum. Its chief science and technology officer, Timor Kadir, says the resources freed up by the system could be redirected to early lung cancer screening, which would allow more cancer patients to be diagnosed much earlier and therefore have a greater chance of survival.

(SD-Agencies)