Study highlights usefulness of AI for transforming patient care

A team from the University of Dundee’s School of Medicine, working with Glasgow-based Red Star AI, has discovered the potential for Artificial Intelligence to transform care for heart failure patients.

In a pilot project machine learning was used to examine health records of heart failure patients, determining whether or not modern knowledge and medications could potentially improve both their welfare and quality of life.

Research lead Dr Ify Mordi, Senior Lecturer at the University of Dundee, said, “AI is already beginning to show its potential, but projects such as this are a demonstration of how we can harness this to revolutionise patient care.

“Over the past few years, there have been major advances in heart failure care with new medications, however many patients who were diagnosed before these advances may not yet be on up-to-date treatment.

 “If we could identify such patients at an earlier stage, we might be able to intervene before a deterioration, but at present doing this is often difficult and time-consuming, as it requires busy clinical teams to do a manual search of patient records over weeks and months.”

The study team worked with Red Star AI to develop software capable of scanning “echo reports”, an ultrasound of the heart and other medical data to determine what treatment would best benefit each patient. The team then developed personalised treatment plans for patients, leading to improvements in quality of life and markers of heart stress. Overall the research team was able to determine that AI was able to scan records both quickly and accurately.

Conducted with support from DataLab Scotland, the Small Business Research Initiative and the University’s Health Informatics Centre, the findings were presented at the European Society of Cardiology Conference held in London from August 30 – September 2.

Andrew Conkie, CEO of Red Star AI, said: “The improvements in quality of life shown in this study demonstrate the potential for AI to improve population health at scale.”

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