Prediction of diagnosis and diastolic filling pressure by AI-enhanced cardiac MRI: a modelling study of hospital data

Background

With increasing numbers of patients and novel drugs for distinct causes of systolic and diastolic heart failure, automated assessment of cardiac function is important. We aimed to provide a non-invasive method to predict diagnosis of patients undergoing cardiac MRI (cMRI) and to obtain left ventricular end-diastolic pressure (LVEDP).

Methods

For this modelling study, patients who had undergone cardiac catheterisation at University Hospital Heidelberg (Heidelberg, Germany) between July 15, 2004 and March 16, 2023, were identified, as were individual left ventricular pressure measurements. We used existing patient data from routine cardiac diagnostics. From this initial group, we extracted patients who had been diagnosed with ischaemic cardiomyopathy, dilated cardiomyopathy, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or amyloidosis, as well as control individuals with no structural phenotype. Data were pseudonymised and only processed within the university hospital's AI infrastructure. We used the data to build different models to predict either demographic (ie, AI-age and AI-sex), diagnostic (ie, AI-coronary artery disease and AI-cardiomyopathy [AI-CMP]), or functional parameters (ie, AI-LVEDP). We randomly divided our datasets via computer into training, validation, and test datasets. AI-CMP was not compared with other models, but was validated in a prospective setting. Benchmarking was also done.

Findings

66 936 patients who had undergone cardiac catheterisation at University Hospital Heidelberg were identified, with more than 183 772 individual left ventricular pressure measurements. We extracted 4390 patients from this initial group, of whom 1131 (25·8%) had been diagnosed with ischaemic cardiomyopathy, 1064 (24·2%) had been diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, 816 (18·6%) had been diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, 202 (4·6%) had been diagnosed with amyloidosis, and 1177 (26·7%) were control individuals with no structural phenotype. The core cohort only included patients with cardiac catherisation and cMRI within 30 days, and emergency cases were excluded. AI-sex was able to predict patient sex with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) of 0·78 (95% CI 0·77–0·78) and AI-age was able to predict patient age with a mean absolute error of 7·86 years (7·77–7·95), with a Pearson correlation of 0·57 (95% CI 0·56–0·57). The AUCs for the classification tasks ranged between 0·82 (95% CI 0·79–0·84) for ischaemic cardiomyopathy and 0·92 (0·91–0·94) for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Interpretation

Our AI models could be easily integrated into clinical practice and provide added value to the information content of cMRI, allowing for disease classification and prediction of diastolic function.

Funding

Informatics for Life initiative of the Klaus-Tschira Foundation, German Center for Cardiovascular Research, eCardiology section of the German Cardiac Society, and AI Health Innovation Cluster Heidelberg.