Many serious diseases develop silently long before people notice that anything is wrong. Heart failure is one of them.
It usually takes years for the heart to weaken enough to cause symptoms, and by that stage some damage may already be permanent.
Researchers have now developed an artificial intelligence system that may allow doctors to detect warning signs much earlier using a test that is already common in everyday medical care.
The research was carried out by scientists from the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering in Israel and was published in npj Digital Medicine. The project was led by Professor Joachim Behar and doctoral researcher Eran Zvuloni together with doctors and researchers from several leading Israeli hospitals, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Leumit Health Services.
Heart failure affects about 64 million people across the world. The condition becomes much more common with age and affects around 12 percent of adults over 65 in many developed countries.
When the heart cannot pump blood efficiently, people may feel breathless, unusually tired, weak, or notice swelling in their feet and legs. Many patients eventually need repeated hospital treatment, and severe heart failure can become life-threatening.
Because treatments work best before extensive heart damage develops, doctors have been searching for reliable ways to identify people who appear healthy but are actually moving toward heart failure. Traditional testing often detects problems only after symptoms or obvious changes become visible.
The newly developed DeepHHF system approaches the problem differently. The research team trained the AI using approximately 70,000 twenty-four-hour Holter ECG recordings.
During Holter monitoring, people wear a lightweight recorder while carrying on with normal daily activities. The device captures every heartbeat over an entire day, producing far more information than a short ECG performed in a clinic.
The AI examined the raw recordings and learned to recognise tiny electrical patterns linked with future heart failure. These patterns are so subtle that they are generally impossible for clinicians to identify during routine review. Once trained, the program could estimate which patients faced a much higher risk years before heart failure became clinically apparent.
The researchers report that DeepHHF may predict heart failure up to five years before diagnosis. That extra time could allow doctors to recommend healthier lifestyles, improve treatment of high blood pressure and diabetes, prescribe medications when appropriate, and monitor patients more closely.
Preventing or delaying heart failure would reduce suffering for patients while also lowering healthcare costs.
One reason this study stands out is that it uses a test already available in many healthcare systems. If the AI continues to perform well in future research, hospitals may be able to add the software without requiring completely new medical equipment. This could make the technology easier to introduce than many other advanced diagnostic tools.
Artificial intelligence has attracted growing attention because it can process huge amounts of medical information quickly and consistently. Even so, researchers emphasise that AI should assist doctors rather than replace them. Medical decisions must always consider the patient’s complete health picture and should never rely on a computer prediction alone.
The investigators also recognise that further work remains. The current results need to be confirmed in additional patient groups, different countries, and different healthcare settings. Researchers will also need to prove that acting on AI warnings changes patient outcomes rather than simply predicting who will become ill.
Overall, the study highlights how artificial intelligence could shift healthcare from treating disease after it appears to preventing disease before it causes harm. Using a familiar, painless heart monitoring test to identify future risk years in advance is an appealing approach that could benefit millions of people if confirmed by future research.
If you care about heart disease, please read studies that herbal supplements could harm your heart rhythm, and how eating eggs can help reduce heart disease risk.
For more health information, please see recent studies that apple juice could benefit your heart health, and results showing yogurt may help lower the death risks in heart disease.
Source: Technion.
