At such a juncture in time, a trial presented at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) has shown that an artificial intelligence has been able to detect the susceptibility of a patient to heart attack and stroke with just one X-ray.
National Cancer Institute in the United States is researching a technology called CXR-CVD risk. This aims to predict the risk of heart attack and stroke using just a single x-ray.
The model that has been developed by researchers has the ability to predict the 10-year probability of dying from a heart attack or stroke caused by atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
According to bgr.com, it also used a second independent cohort of around 11,430 outpatients, all of whom had chest x-rays that made them potentially eligible for statin therapy, a type of preventative to help with heart attack risk.
"Our deep learning model offers a potential solution for population-based opportunistic screening of cardiovascular disease risk using existing chest X-ray images," said the study's lead author, Jakob Weiss, M.D., a radiologist affiliated with the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and the AI in Medicine programme at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "This type of screening could be used to identify individuals who would benefit from statin medication but are currently untreated."
Current guidelines recommend estimating the 10-year risk of major adverse cardiovascular disease events to establish who should get a statin for primary prevention.
This risk is calculated using the atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk score, a statistical model that considers a host of variables, including age, sex, race, systolic blood pressure, hypertension treatment, smoking, Type 2 diabetes and blood tests. Statin medication is recommended for patients with a 10-year risk of 7.5% or higher.
