Pierre Elias, MD

Assistant Professor of cardiology and biomedical informatics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and medical director for AI at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital 

Among his numerous duties, Pierre directs CRADLE—the Center for Cardiovascular and Radiologic Deep Learning—a 20-person research center built on the country’s largest curated cardiovascular datamart. Over the past two years, his team’s end-to-end AI architecture has aided clinical analysis of 1.1 million electrocardiograms and 140,000 echocardiograms. These figures make CRADLE one of the largest cardiovascular AI screening programs in the U.S. The resulting analyses have promptly delivered potentially lifesaving clinical insights to physicians, researchers and trial coordinators across the enterprise.  

The research output matches the operational scale. In the past year alone, Dr. Elias has been first or last author on cardiovascular AI papers in Nature, JACC, Circulation, European Heart Journal and JAMA Cardiology. His Nature paper became the most-read cardiac AI paper ever published. Business Insider named him one of the 25 most influential people in AI in 2026—the only representative from healthcare. 

At the trial level, his NHLBI-funded CACTUS study is enrolling 54,000 patients across eight emergency departments to test whether AI can detect undiagnosed heart failure and valvular disease at scale. This study may well represent the most ambitious prospective cardiovascular AI trial ever designed. 

At 35, Dr. Pierre Elias has moved well beyond asking whether AI can help improve cardiovascular medicine. He’s seeking—and innovating—ways to make cardiovascular AI make a difference for entire patient populations.