Pierre Elias

I have the ability to put a patient on heart-lung bypass where their organs are literally failing and we're able to keep them alive.

It's truly some of the most ambitious technology humanity has ever created.

And yet the way that I find out that someone had a heart attack is still through a pager.

And then I have to go and say, hey, who here is having the heart attack?

The moments where I feel like I'm really doing science is when I genuinely do not know the answer to the question, but I know it's important to answer it.

We were just told in medical school, we can't detect these forms of cardiovascular disease using this test.

But we asked ourselves, could AI do exactly that?

I'm a cardiologist at Columbia University.

I'm an assistant professor in biomedical informatics.

And I'm also the medical director for artificial intelligence for New York Presbyterian Hospital.

So my center develops, validates, and deploys AI technologies to help us find patients with diseases so that we can take better care of them.

We run the largest cardiovascular AI screening program in the country.

The majority of our work happens within our organization.

This is eight hospital centers, 180 clinics in the greater New York area.

But we really do try to make a lot of this work exist outside of those walls.

I co-founded...

a consortia called Train Cardio, the Task Force for Research Advancement in AI and Cardiology.

This is 20 plus institutions around the country where we regularly validate each other's work, collaborate on large projects, and when possible, freely share that information or that data with the world so that other people can build upon it.

A number of years ago, I got a call in the middle of the night from an outside hospital, and they said, we have a patient that we think we need to send to you urgently.

This was a gentleman who had shown up three months before in their emergency department, and he had shown up with some chest tightness and shortness of breath.