AI stethoscope identifies three heart conditions in 15 seconds

Researchers at Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust reported that an artificial intelligence enabled stethoscope can identify three serious heart conditions in as little as 15 seconds, according to results from a large real world trial presented this week in Madrid. The study tested the device at 96 general practitioner surgeries in North West London and compared outcomes with 109 surgeries that used conventional examination methods, enrolling 12,725 symptomatic patients drawn from more than 1.5 million registered patients across 205 practices.

The device, about the size of a playing card and manufactured by Eko Health, is placed on a patient’s chest to record an electrocardiogram and to capture heart sounds. Those signals are uploaded securely to cloud servers and analysed by AI algorithms trained on tens of thousands of records. Patients flagged as high risk receive a rapid result on a smartphone and proceed to confirmatory testing, typically a blood test for B type natriuretic peptide, or BNP, and a heart scan.

Patients examined with the AI stethoscope were 2.33 times more likely to be diagnosed with heart failure within 12 months than similar...