Spectrum News 1: AI Could Help Bring Down the Number of Heart Disease-Related Deaths

Spectrum News 1 recently interviewed Damini Dey, PhD, professor of biomedical sciences at Cedars-Sinai, and research fellow Kajetan Grodecki, MD, PhD, about how artificial intelligence (AI) can help physicians better determine a patient’s heart attack risk.

Dey told Spectrum News 1 reporter Jas Kang that AI software, which can be used to enhance traditional imaging scans, can lead to earlier diagnosis of heart disease—the leading cause of death in the U.S. 

“This is a very exciting field because it can offer more information than standard scans,” she said.

Grodecki told Kang that AI offers a clearer picture of potential health risks while helping to conduct scans more quickly.

“For a typical clinical setting, we would just describe what kind of narrowing there [is] in the respective coronary artery,” he said. “And with the AI, we can see how much of the non-calcified—the dangerous— plaque there is in the coronary artery.”

Dey told Kang she personally benefited from an AI-enhanced computed tomography angiography—a commonly used heart imaging test—after experiencing concerning shortness of breath.

“I was expecting no calcified plaque, no non-calcified plaque,” she said.

But it turned out that she did, in fact, have both types of plaque.

Dey told Kang that, even as AI becomes more common in healthcare, doctors still will play an essential role. 

“It’s very big already, and I think it will grow more and more,” she said. “It will be in every aspect of patient care, but I think the doctor always has to be in the loop.”

Click here to watch the complete segment from Spectrum News 1.