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Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and echocardiography (or "echo") is the most common way doctors look at the heart. Echo is safe, painless, and can detect major heart problems, including weak heart pumping and valve disease.
Valve disease, especially aortic stenosis (narrowing) and mitral regurgitation (leakage), is common in older adults but often goes undiagnosed. While echo is the main tool for finding valve problems, it takes time, requires expert training, and results can vary between readers.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning (DL), have shown promise in automatically analyzing heart images. However, past research hasn't fully tackled key echo techniques-like color Doppler and spectral Doppler-that are crucial for measuring how blood moves through heart valves. AI tools also face challenges in being used in everyday medical practice because of workflow issues, lack of real-world testing, and concerns about how the algorithms make decisions.
At Columbia University Irving Medical Center, researchers have built a large database of heart tests over the last six years and developed AI programs to analyze echocardiograms. The current study will test whether providing AI analysis to cardiologists in real time during echo reading can make the process faster and more consistent.