New York. NY (June 06, 2023) Mount Sinai researchers have developed an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) model for electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis that allows for the interpretation of ECGs as language. This approach can enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of ECG-related diagnoses, especially for cardiac conditions where limited data is available on which to train.In a study published in the June 6 online issue of npj Digital Medicine DOI: 10.1038/s41746-023-00840-9, the team reported that its new deep learning model, known as HeartBEiT, forms a foundation upon which specialized diagnostic models can be created. The team noted that in comparison tests, models created using HeartBEiT surpassed established methods for ECG analysis.

“Our model consistently outperformed convolutional neural networks [CNNs], which are commonly used machine learning algorithms for computer vision tasks. Such CNNs are often pretrained on publicly available images of real-world objects,” says first author Akhil Vaid, MD, Instructor of Data-Driven and Digital Medicine (D3M) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Because HeartBEiT is specialized to ECGs, it can perform as well as, if not better than, these methods using a tenth of the data. This makes ECG-based diagnosis considerably more viable, especially for rare conditions which affect fewer patients and therefore have limited data available.”

Thanks to their low cost, non-invasiveness, and wide applicability to cardiac disease, more than 100 million electrocardiograms are performed each year in the United States alone. Nonetheless, the ECG’s usefulness is limited in scope since physicians cannot consistently identify, with the naked eye, patterns representative of disease, particularly for conditions which do not have established diagnostic criteria or where such patterns may be too subtle or chaotic for human interpretation. Artificial intelligence is now revolutionizing the science, however, with most of the work to date centered on CNNs.
Mount Sinai is taking the field in a bold new direction by building on the intense interest in so-called generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, which are built on transformers—deep learning models that are trained on massive datasets of text to generate human-like responses to prompts from users on almost any topic. Researchers are using a related image-generating model to create discrete representations of small parts of the ECG, enabling analysis of the ECG as language.

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