AI to detect heart attacks tested in the land of the deep-fried Mars bar Hospitals in Scotland are trying out AI software that can determine whether a patient is suffering from a heart attack, in an effort to improve accident and emergency response times. Heart attacks can be difficult to detect as its symptoms – including chest pain, dizziness, and shortness of breath – are associated with many …
Heart Attacks are normally fairly easy to observe when you get a decent EKG recording, basically just monitor the electrical heart muscle contractions, they are quite complex but looking at the baseline level changes with the "p", "QRS" and T-waves will give you a good diagnosis of a potential heart attack or other issues. So all you need to do is look at their heartbeats for a few minutes once you have some EKG interpretation experience (mine's about 40 years now, because that's how I started electronics).
And they are using the ECG as one of the inputs to the ML system. Which will probably give them a very good chance of spotting issues before it's visually obvious in just one of those inputs, even to an experienced observer.
It's not even a new concept:
https://www.health.org.uk/improvement-projects/continuous-remote-monitoring-of-ill-children
Yeah, but using an EKG machine and interpreting the results will always be specialised. Running an AI model on your laptop at home and answering a few questions won't be.
The eventual goal with this tech won't be to improve upon a manual detection of a heart attack, it will be to achieve earlier detection and reduce the number of people turning up at a GP. AI in medicine will likely end up becoming a triage tool...suspected severe heart condition? Straight to a specialist, mild condition manageable with medication? Off to the GP you go. etc etc.
I blame the American Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, N./S. Dakota) with their overly indulgent "state fairs" [1]. They'll deep-fry just about anything [2].
[1] Coincidentally, yesterday was "Statehood Day" for Minnesota [3].
[2] My personal favorite at the Minn. State Fair -- at least in hindsight -- was the Pronto Pup: a corn dog using not cornmeal but wheat-based pancake batter, so it fries up extra thick and they have to use a full-round dowel, not those weak, flat sticks. I've lived in Michigan for a while (18 years [4]) and need to take my kids to "The Great Minnesota Get-Together" if only so my son gets a Pronto Pup.
[3] Minnesota has the world-famous Mayo Clinic -- they missed their opportunity on this one!
[4] Michigan does not have their own state fair anymore, but they do have plenty of indulgent heart-clogging food: paczki (Polish pre-Lenten doughnut), Detroit-style deep-dish pizza, and Mackinac Island fudge.
The deep fried Mars bar (which was reputedly invented here) is often used as the archetypal unhealthy deep-fried Scottish food. But ironically, it's not actually *that* common here. More of an "I've tried it once [if that]" novelty, and as much with tourists as the people living here.
It's all the *other* deep-fried or generally high-fat foods that Scots eat that's the bigger problem.
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Only once have I seen a deep fried mars bar on offer in a Scottish chippy. That was in the Royal Mile in Edinburgh a real tourist trap. It would also have been 20 years ago. I do recall I had the haggis supper though. I have some haggis in my fridge here in Dundee. At least half of it will be haggis pakoras sometime soon. Those should be much better known than the chocolate bar thing. Haggis pakoras are the foods of the gods.
AI for diagnosis consultation will make a huge difference in a doctor being able to treat somebody promptly for the actual condition. As the article states, chest pain can be an issue with many things that aren't a heart attack. It happened to me once and it turned out to be an allergic reaction rather than the ticker having issues. The same can be said about many sorts of symptoms and doctors have very little time to make a decision these days which can lead to mistakes. Insurance companies are also likely to be onboard with AI diagnostics so treatments are more accurate and expensive treatments are only deployed when needed. My doctor could have sent me in for an angiogram, MRI and all sorts of tests that would have cost me and insurance a load of money. It just so happens that many people in my area were also having severe allergic reactions due to dry conditions and wind stirring up pollens. I was tested for my reaction to the pollens and it turns out I reacted badly to what was blowing in the wind and the ECG wasn't showing any signs of a heart condition.
Even if the AI can only short list a menu of possibilities, many of those might be easy to rule out right away but it might flag something that the doctor won't have thought of.
There are at least half a dozen things that can manifest as chest pain with light-headedness and even heart palpitations. In my case, it was a raging h.pylori infection. Having finished off my stomach with inflammation, it moved on to the nervous system where it can even cause dementia if left alone for too long. It's really quite a relief to go in and get hooked up and told "Well, there's clearly something wrong with you but your heart is fine" Though it did take another month and a battery of tests to figure out exactly what the cause was. It normally just causes stomach upset and ulcers, I was just lucky to have it progress onto the CNS.
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