Artificial intelligence (AI) can handle a variety of tasks, some more helpful than others. Endeavor Health cardiologists have found a way AI can improve healthcare for heart patients.
Echocardiograms, which are ultrasounds of the heart, require expert analysis to interpret the results. This work includes evaluating many variables and obtaining a large number of measurements, which can take up to 30 minutes per echocardiogram.
Physicians and technicians often read 25 or more echocardiograms per day. For a human, this gets time consuming. But AI can provide validated measurements in the blink of an eye, which allows the sonographer and cardiologist to focus on diagnosis and interpretation.
Not only does the technology save time, it increases the reproducibility of measurements and stacks up well to human readers, said Ilya Karagodin, MD, cardiologist with Endeavor Health.
As one of the first sites in the Midwest to use AI technology clinically in the echocardiography lab, Endeavor Health experts have found tremendous potential to improve diagnostic capabilities to help patients.
“We’re excited to be live with this integration, allowing us to get a structured report and secondary capture images into our [medical imaging] system in a more efficient way,” Dr. Karagodin said. “This advanced technology leverages AI to deliver consistent and fast imaging analysis, empowering us to accelerate informed treatment decisions for our patients.”
Endeavor Health is in the first phase of this technology launch, still using human experts to read echocardiograms while also using the AI measurements as a decision support tool, which is like having a second set of eyes.
“It’s well validated. It provides us with an AI-generated report with measurements of function, wall thickness, chamber size, and valvular function, as well as most of the quantitative parameters we would measure for any patient,” Dr. Karagodin said. “We’ve had positive feedback thus far, and people are excited about it.”
Eventually, the goal would be to use AI-generated measurements directly in the echo reports, allowing for even greater time savings and efficiency gains.
“We always have a human looking over everything and making the final diagnosis,” Dr. Karagodin said. “But the use of AI allows us to save time and improve efficiency, helping to address physician burn-out and allowing our sonographers to focus more on scanning and image acquisition, and less on the laborious task of manual measurements.”
