EchoNext Flags 10% Heart Function After 45-Year-Old Is Misdiagnosed With Asthma
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Jun 22
EchoNext Flags 10% Heart Function After 45-Year-Old Is Misdiagnosed With Asthma
1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jun 22
Summary
Louie Quiros, 45, was called back to a Queens hospital a week after emergency-room doctors sent him home with asthma medicine despite coughing blood and struggling to breathe.
EchoNext — an A.I. tool reviewing electrocardiograms across NewYork-Presbyterian — detected signs of severe heart damage in his ECG that clinicians had not recognized.
An echocardiogram then showed his heart was pumping out just 10% of its blood with each beat and that his mitral valve was leaking blood backward.
The case comes from a clinical trial of EchoNext, developed by Dr. Pierre Elias and colleagues; the system reads ECGs in under 10 minutes and is used on nearly 500,000 scans a year.
When a life-saving AI makes a fatal mistake, who is held accountable: the doctor, the hospital, or its developer?
If an AI detects a disease a doctor misses, can the doctor's intuition ethically overrule the algorithm?
Will medical AI create a new divide between rich hospitals that can afford it and poor ones that cannot?
EchoNext AI in Cardiac Care: Reducing Misdiagnosis and Improving Early Detection of Structural Heart Disease
Overview
Structural heart disease affects millions worldwide and often goes undetected due to the lack of routine, affordable screening. EchoNext, an innovative AI tool, addresses this gap by analyzing data from routine electrocardiograms to identify individuals at risk. In practice, EchoNext flagged potential severe heart damage in a patient, leading to a follow-up echocardiogram that revealed a critical heart condition. This demonstrates how EchoNext can enable early detection and intervention, helping to prevent significant health loss by catching serious heart issues before they progress.