Read heart attack risks in eyes
Using eye scanners, researchers from KU Leuven have succeeded in predicting the risk of an infarctus occurring within twelve months. This major step forward is now possible thanks to the processing of a series of data by artificial intelligence.
This new technique, which should revolutionise the detection of cardiac problems, is the work of an international team of researchers led by Professor Alex Frangi from KU Leuven. Because, although we already knew that slight changes in the retina's blood vessels could be an early warning sign of cardiovascular disease, the medical world has never had the means to identify the risk of infarctus so accurately.
In concrete terms, the diagnosis is based on the analysis of retina scans associated with a series of data such as age and gender. The advance is not so much in the material used, since the retina scanners used are those commonly found in eye clinics, but rather how the data is processed by an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
This AI system set up by Belgian researchers is able to accurately and automatically associate the appearance of the retina's blood vessels with potential coronary diseases. Therefore, this makes it possible to refer high-risk patients quickly and preventively with an accuracy of 70 to 80%.
Bearing in mind that cardiovascular diseases are the first cause of premature death in the world, this new relatively inexpensive technology is likely to become widely used around the world.