How Caristo is Using AI to Reduce Heart Attack Risk

If you learned that radiologists looking at CT scans for the traditional signs of coronary artery disease catch only 20 percent of the people who actually have a high risk of a heart attack, and if you learned that there’s a new AI-based test that can catch subtle signs of inflammation in the other 80 percent of patients—well, you’d probably want to get that test yourself, right? Harry's guests this week, Frank Cheng and Keith Channon, are from a UK-based company that has developed just such a test. Cheng is the company's CEO, and Channon is co-founder and chief medical officer. And under their leadership, Caristo has introduced a test called CariHeart that applies machine learning to the data in a three-dimensional CT scan of the heart. It looks for otherwise invisible signs of inflammation in the fat tissue around the major coronary arteries, and then it predicts the chances that the patient will suffer a heart attack in the next eight years. Doctors can use that information to decide whether a patient needs to take a cholesterol-lowering drug like a statin or an anti-inflammatory drug like colchicine. 

Caristo’s test is being used on an experimental basis in the UK, and it hasn’t yet been approved for use in the US. But it’s a leading example of the way AI, put together with fundamental advances in our understanding of human biology, is really beginning to change the practice of medicine. Cheng and Channon say Caristo’s test isn’t intended to put cardiologists or radiologists out of work—it’s designed to help them be more effective. And given that cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death around the world, any technology that can help catch signs of coronary artery disease earlier could save a lot of lives.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

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