Pierre Elias

We didn't think that the cardiologists would do very good.

They didn't think they would do very good.

Then we asked AI and it was 78%.

The cardiologists were as far away from random chance as they were from the AI model in being able to predict which patients had structural heart disease or not from their electrocardiogram.

We did, and the cardiologists got a little better, but they weren't as good as AI alone.

The cardiologists with AI were 68%.

What's funny is myself and my co-creator, Tim Poderuka, we did the survey as well, but we recused ourselves from the results, and we were no better than the other cardiologists, even though we built the model.

Wow.

The really shocking finding, though, was half of the patients that the AI model thought were high risk for undiagnosed structural heart disease don't go on to get an echocardiogram in the next year.

So what that told us is there was smoking gun evidence that there was a lot of people out there with undiagnosed structural heart disease.

And this is like clinically significant disease.

This is the sort of stuff where if I told any doctor, I believe that a patient had heart failure or severe valvular heart disease, we would all agree that we need to clinically act upon this now.

And that led to us running something called CACTUS.

This is the largest cardiovascular AI screening trial in the country.

It's happening in eight emergency departments in the greater New York area.

Any patient who shows up in any one of these emergency departments, if they get an electrocardiogram, they're automatically being screened by the AI model for undiagnosed structural heart disease.

One of the most striking was a young man who had been exposed to smoke during the LA fires and then had recently moved to New York.

He had shown up with some shortness of breath in the emergency department, and they had presumed that this was asthma and bronchitis, and they had sent him home with an albuterol inhaler saying, follow up if you need to, but nothing else is necessary.

It turns out that Echonex told us this patient was at very high risk for undiagnosed structural heart disease.

such a high risk that we actually got the procedure done urgently.