Cardiac amyloidosis: New AI system developed for early diagnosis

Cardiac amyloidosis is a serious disease in which abnormal proteins (amyloids) accumulate in the heart muscle and impair heart function. As the disease leads to serious complications such as heart insufficiency and, in many cases, death if left untreated, early diagnosis is essential in order to start treatment in good time. An international research team led by MedUni Vienna has now developed and tested an AI system that can be used to automatically and reliably detect cardiac amyloidosis. The results of the study have just been published in the top journal "The Lancet Digital Health". The new AI system was developed and validated using data sets from 16,000 patients who underwent a scintigraphy imaging examination at nine institutions in Europe and Asia, including Vienna General Hospital, between 2010 and 2020. Scintigraphy is a nuclear medicine procedure that is used to diagnose cancer, thyroid, kidney and heart disease, among other things. The new AI tool created as part of the research work led by Christian Nitsche (MedUni Vienna's Department of Medicine II) and Marcus Hacker (MedUni Vienna's Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy) can automatically recognise cardiac amyloidosis during a scintigraphy, thereby significantly speeding up the diagnosis.