VIDEO: AI model targets inflammation, helping cardiologists find 'invisible' heart patients

Cardiologists have been focused on treating coronary plaques as a way to prevent heart attacks for decades now. Coronary inflammation, however, has been largely ignored. That changed in 2023, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared colchicine as the first drug to treat coronary inflammation for the prevention of heart attacks. Now there is a cardiac CT imaging artificial intelligence (AI) tool that will enable clear imaging of coronary inflammation in routine scans. 

At the American Heart Association (AHA) 2023 meeting, a groundbreaking study presented by the University of Oxford revealed how Caristo's CaRi-Heart AI assessment software can visualize inflammation in the perivascular fat surrounding arteries and its ability to assess cardiovascular risk and prevent heart attacks. About 40,000 coronary CT angiography (CCTA) scans were reviewed by the AI model from the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) records. It was able to link those CT scans from 10 years previously with health outcomes over the following 10 years. 

Almost half of patients without coronary narrowings were reclassified when coronary inflammation, rather than only plaque alone, was taken into account. 

Cardiovascular Business spoke with interventional cardiologist Keith Channon, MD, MBChB, FRCP, the British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford, a co-founder of Caristo, whose team conducted the study. 

"What it found is that, although the presence of significant coronary artery narrowings was associated with about a twofold increased risk of a heart attack or death over the following 10 years, more than 80% of people who underwent a CT coronary scan for clinical reasons didn't have significantly narrowed arteries. And although the risk was lower in percentage terms, the absolute number of people dying or having a heart attack after their heart CT scan was substantially higher in the group who didn't have major narrowings," Channon explained.