https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3100-6806
Extract
On 16th and 17th December, the 3rd Christmas Postgraduate Course ‘Cardiology Update London’ 2019 took place with a inspiring programme. The course was again endorsed by the European Society of Cardiology, as one of three postgraduate courses of the society, in addition to courses in Dubrovnik and Davos. The idea of the Cardiology Update Series is to provide a comprehensive overview on the current status of cardiovascular medicine at large with lectures by key opinion leaders in the most important fields of heart disease.
The keynote lectures
The programme started with an inspiring lecture by Prof. Paul Freedman from the Mayo Clinic on ‘Artificial Intelligence—What Does it Provide for Medicine?’ Prof. Freedman outlined the impressive research programme they developed using more than half a million of the electrocardiograms (ECGs) from the Mayo Clinic to teach a computer to distinguish between patients without left ventricular dysfunction and a history of atrial fibrillation (Figure 1). Amazingly, after several steps, the developed algorithm is now able to detect patients with a past history of atrial fibrillation based on a dozen heartbeats of an irregular ECG. This is of invaluable importance for the management of patients with embolic stroke of undetermined source that has so far been an enigma for cardiologists and neurologists alike. Appropriate and personalized anticoagulation in patients with a high probability of episodes of atrial fibrillation can now be easily prescribed to avoid further risk of stroke.1 Furthermore, the algorithm is able to detect patients with left ventricular dysfunction, which is another impressive feature of this research. Therefore, artificial intelligence and machine learning have a huge potential in cardiovascular medicine, both for ECG analysis and imaging among other areas.
