(Press-News.org) In a new study published in the European Heart Journal, researchers reported the successful development and validation of a medical artificial intelligence (AI) model that screens for cardiac amyloidosis, a progressive and irreversible type of heart disease.
The results showed that the AI tool is highly accurate, outperforming existing methods and potentially enabling earlier, more accurate diagnoses so patients can benefit from getting the right treatment sooner.
What is cardiac amyloidosis?
Cardiac amyloidosis is a heart condition in which abnormal proteins build up in the heart muscle, making it stiff and impairing its ability to pump blood. Multiple life-prolonging drug treatments for this condition have recently become available, but without early diagnosis, physicians miss out on opportunities to extend patients’ survival and quality of life.
“Unfortunately, cardiac amyloidosis can be challenging to diagnose, because it’s often difficult to distinguish from other heart issues without a burdensome amount of testing,” explained co-lead author Jeremy Slivnick, MD, a cardiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine.
Developing AI for cardiology
The AI model was developed by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and Ultromics, Ltd., an AI echocardiography company. They trained a neural network to detect cardiac amyloidosis using routine heart ultrasound images, known as echocardiograms.
The resulting AI model can analyze a single echocardiogram video of the heart's apical four-chamber view to quickly detect cardiac amyloidosis and differentiate it from other similar heart conditions.
UChicago Medicine joined 17 other hospitals worldwide to validate and test the algorithm’s results in a large and multiethnic patient population. They found that the AI tool demonstrated an accuracy rate of 85% for correctly identifying patients with cardiac amyloidosis and 93% for correctly ruling it out. This efficacy held true across multiple types of cardiac amyloidosis in diverse populations.
In their analysis, Slivnick and his colleagues compared the AI model to existing clinical scoring methods commonly used to detect cardiac amyloidosis. Their results showed that it significantly outperformed these traditional approaches, making it easier for doctors to decide who needs advanced imaging tests or further evaluation.
“It was exciting to confirm that artificial intelligence can give clinicians reliable information to augment their expert decision-making process,” Slivnick said. “Since the new treatments for cardiac amyloidosis are most effective in early stages of the disease, it’s critical that we leverage every tool at our disposal to diagnose it as soon as possible.”
Bringing AI into the clinic
The AI model is FDA-cleared and already being implemented at multiple hospitals across the country, and the researchers hope its use will ultimately become widespread in routine cardiac care.
"This AI model provides a practical solution," Slivnick said. "Because it automatically analyzes a common echocardiogram view, it can easily integrate into everyday clinical practice without causing hassle or sacrificing diagnostic accuracy."
“Cardiac amyloidosis detection from a single echocardiographic video clip: a novel artificial intelligence-based screening tool” was published in the European Heart Journal in July 2025. Authors include Jeremy Slivnick, Will Hawkes, Jorge Oliveira, Gary Woodward, Ashley Akerman, Alberto Gomez, Izhan Hamza, Viral Desai, Zachary Barrett-O’Keefe, Martha Grogan, Angela Dispenzieri, Christopher Scott, Halley Davison, Juan Cotella, Matthew Maurer, Stephen Helmke, Marielle Scherrer-Crosbie, Marwa Soltani, Akash Goyal, Karolina Zareba, Richard Cheng, James Kirkpatrick, Tetsuji Kitano, Masaaki Takeuchi, Viviane Tiemi Hotta, Marcelo Luiz Campos Vieira, Pablo Elissamburu, Ricardo Ronderos, Aldo Prado, Efstratios Koutroumpakis, Anita Deswal, Amit Pursnani, Nitasha Sarswat, Amit Patel, Karima Addetia, Frederick Ruberg, Michael Randazzo, Federico Asch, Jamie O’Driscoll, Nora Al-Roub, Jordan Strom, Liam Kidd, Sarah Cuddy, Ross Upton, Roberto Lang and Patricia Pellikka.
END
AI tool helps improve detection of cardiac amyloidosis
2025-07-09
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Loneliness predicts poor mental and physical health outcomes
2025-07-09
Loneliness is common and is a strong and independent predictor of depression and poor health outcomes, according to a new study published July 9, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Dr. Oluwasegun Akinyemi, a Senior Research Fellow at the Howard University College of Medicine, Washington DC, U.S.
Loneliness has emerged as a significant public health concern in the United States, with profound implications for mental and physical health. In the new study, researchers analyzed Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data collected via phone surveys between 2016 and 2023. The study population included 47,318 non-institutionalized adults living in the U.S., predominantly ...
Keeping the photon in the dark
2025-07-09
Excitons – bound pairs of electrons and electron hole – are quasiparticles that can arise in solids. While so-called “bright” excitons emit light and are therefore accessible, dark excitons are optically inactive. As a result, they have a significantly longer lifetime – which makes them ideal for storing and controlling quantum states and using them for advanced methods to generate entanglement.
Gregor Weihs and his team from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, together with researchers in Dortmund, ...
FDA-approved drugs could make nano-medicine safer, study finds
2025-07-09
An international study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has identified a promising strategy to enhance the safety of nanomedicines, advanced therapies often used in cancer and vaccine treatments, by using drugs already approved by the FDA for unrelated conditions.
The study was published today in Science Advances.
Their research suggests that repurposing existing medications can reduce harmful immune responses associated with nanoparticles. These ultra-small particles are designed ...
Many seafloor fish communities are retaining their individuality despite human impacts
2025-07-09
Despite widespread human impacts to wildlife diversity worldwide, many fish communities on the seafloor have maintained their uniqueness, reports a new study led by Zoë Kitchel, formerly of Rutgers University, and colleagues, published July 9 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate.
Around the world, humans have transformed ecosystems through development, hunting and fishing, invasive species and climate change. On land and in freshwater ecosystems, these changes have typically led to a process called homogenization, where the types ...
Somali women’s perspectives on female genital mutilation and its abandonment
2025-07-09
Somali women describe a complex and shifting tradition of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in Somalia, according to a study published July 9, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Zamzam I.A. Ali from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK and the Mayo Clinic, US, and colleagues.
Female genital mutilation/cutting, which increases the risks of immediate and long-term psychological, obstetric, genitourinary and sexual and reproductive health complications, has no health benefits. It continues to be a human rights issue globally, with the UN and the Human Rights Council calling for a complete end to the practice. ...
Structure of tick-borne virus revealed at atomic resolution for the first time
2025-07-09
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As summer kicks into full gear and people are spending more time outside, there’s one thing on many people’s minds — ticks. Tick season is starting earlier and lasting longer, and ticks are popping up in areas they haven’t been found before, expanding the risk of tick-borne viruses.
One emerging tick-borne virus in North America — including in Pennsylvania — is the Powassan virus (POWV), which can cause encephalitis, seizures, paralysis and ...
The robot will see you now
2025-07-09
As waiting rooms fill up, doctors get increasingly burnt out, and surgeries take longer to schedule and more get cancelled, humanoid surgical robots offer a solution. That’s the argument that UC San Diego robotics expert Michael Yip makes in a perspective piece out July 9 in Science Robotics.
Why? Today’s surgical robots are costly pieces of equipment designed for specialized tasks and can only be operated by highly trained physicians. However, this model doesn’t scale. Despite the drastic improvements in artificial intelligence and autonomy for industrial and humanoid robots in the past year, these improvements haven’t ...
Stepping up the potential of wearables: predicting pediatric surgery complications
2025-07-09
An estimated 4 million children undergo surgical procedures in hospitals across the United States each year. Although postoperative complications, such as infections, can pose significant health risks to kids, timely detection following hospital discharge can prove challenging.
A new study published in Science Advances — and led by researchers at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and University of Alabama at Birmingham — is the first to use consumer wearables to quickly and precisely predict postoperative complications in children and shows potential for facilitating faster treatment ...
Prenatal and childhood lead exposure linked to faster memory decay in children
2025-07-09
New York, NY — July 9, 2025 — A study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai shows that exposure to lead during pregnancy and early childhood may accelerate the rate at which children forget information—a critical marker of memory impairment that may have implications for learning and development.
Using delayed matching-to-sample task (DMTS)—a cognitive task that can be used to evaluate underlying neurobehavioral functions, such as attention and working memory, and has been demonstrated to be sensitive to metal neurotoxicants—the study examined how both prenatal ...
Medical needles in the hands of AI
2025-07-09
Imagine a physician attempting to reach a cancerous nodule deep within a patient's lung – a target the size of a pea, hidden behind a maze of critical blood vessels and airways that shift with every breath. Straying one millimeter off course could puncture a major artery, and falling short could mean missing the cancer entirely, allowing it to spread untreated.
This is the high-stakes reality physicians face in thousands of procedures daily, where accuracy is critical and the task is complicated by anatomical obstacles that are non-penetrable or sensitive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) and robots help address these challenges and ...