Detecting structural heart disease from electrocardiograms using AI.

Overview

Early detection of structural heart disease is critical to improving outcomes, but widespread screening remains limited by the cost and accessibility of imaging tools such as echocardiography^1,2. Recent advances in machine learning applied to heart rhythm recordings have shown promise in identifying disease^3,4, although previous work has been limited by development in narrow populations or targeting only select heart conditions⁵. Here we introduce a deep learning model, EchoNext, trained on more than 1 million heart rhythm and imaging records across a large and diverse health system to detect many forms of structural heart disease. The model demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy in internal and external validation, outperforming cardiologists in a controlled evaluation and showing consistent performance across different care settings and racial and/or ethnic groups. The models were prospectively evaluated in a clinical trial of patients without previous cardiac imaging, successfully identifying previously undiagnosed heart disease. These findings support the potential of artificial intelligence to expand access to heart disease screening at scale. To enable further development and transparency, we have publicly released model weights and a large, annotated dataset linking heart rhythm data to imaging-based diagnoses.