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The NHS in England has come up with an AI tool that is hard to imagine for most of us. It’s called AIRE or Artificial Intelligence Risk Estimation, which helps predict the patient’s risk of disease and early death.

The technology works by reading the results of ECG tests, which are used to record the electrical activity in the heart. In today’s article lets address a few questions about this ineffable technology-

Q. Will AIRE replace cardiologists?

The answer to that is No. In fact, AIRE supplements the activities of doctors with something they could not do.

Generally cardiologists look at ECG reports and classify them as normal or abnormal, with a chance to miss certain subtle anomalies. AIRE, on the other hand can detect problems in the structure of the heart and flag problems that might not be apparent to doctors. According to research published in the Lancet Digital Health journal, AIRE can correctly identify a patient’s risk of death in the 10 years after the ECG in 78% of cases.

Q. Is the technology an idea or ready for practical use?

You’d be happy to know that AIRE is completely ready. It has been trained by medical researchers using 1.16 million ECG reports from over 150,000 patients worldwide. Medical testing of AIRE will now begin at hospitals across Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. According to The Guardian, these clinical trials will focus on evaluating the benefits of implementing the model with real patients and will start by mid-2025.

Q. What is the long term vision of this development?

According to the researchers who developed AIRE, the purpose is to equip ECG reports which can be done at an affordable cost, with a model to predict the chances of future diseases at minimal incremental costs. This will make advanced medical diagnosis accessible for a larger number of people, help to reallocate resources to more urgent cases as well as supplement preventative treatments at an early stage.

Q. What are the implications of AI in the healthcare space?

Well, that’s a tough nut to crack. AI is definitely making its mark in the healthcare space and reimagining the scope of medical assistance. However, since most AI models are trained on historical data, it is important to take into account the medical developments that come into picture as we progress in time and have scope to incorporate them to ensure better AI predictability. Another caveat is to ensure adequate privacy of healthcare data of individuals. However, the overall positive impact that AI could have on the healthcare industry cannot be emphasised enough.

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