Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Amid growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, a new large-scale clinical trial published in The Lancet on January 29 showed that an AI-enabled stethoscope can boost early detection of various heart diseases. A team of Spanish researchers found that an AI-enabled stethoscope helped doctors in identifying early signs of serious heart conditions, such as heart failure, arrhythmias, and valve disease, in primary care clinics.
The study found that introducing the technology to doctors led to a substantially faster and more frequent detection — nearly twice as many new heart failure cases and three times as many detections of irregular heart rhythms — of these cardiovascular conditions, indicating that the device performed well.
“Primary care faces a growing workload and limited resources, making it the ideal recipient of the efficiencies promised by artificial intelligence (AI). The potential of AI to improve diagnostic accuracy through decision support systems or image analysis is clear. However, implementing these tools into primary care workflows remains challenging,” said corresponding author Sergio Cinza-Sanjurjo from Santiago de Compostela University, Spain.
The Tricorder trial is the first cluster randomised controlled implementation trial (RCIT) of a clinical AI technology on a national scale, involving 205 UK NHS general practices and more than 1.5 million registered patients in the UK. The AI stethoscope integrates three algorithms designed to detect heart failure, irregular heart rhythms, and valve disease during routine appointments.