A new JACC study showed that Ultromics’ EchoGo Pro AI solution can accurately classify stress echocardiograms, while improving clinician performance with a particularly challenging and operator-dependent exam.
The researchers used EchoGo Pro to independently analyze 154 stress echo studies, leveraging the solution’s 31 image features to identify patients with severe coronary artery disease with a 0.927 AUC (84.4% sensitivity; 92.7% specificity).
EchoGo Pro maintained similar performance with a version of the test dataset that excluded the 38 patients with known coronary artery disease or resting wall motion abnormalities (90.5% sensitivity; 88.4% specificity).
The researchers then had four physicians with different levels of stress echo experience analyze the same 154 studies with and without AI support, finding that the EchoGo Pro reports:
- Improved the readers’ average AUC – 0.877 vs. 0.931
- Increased their mean sensitivity – 85% vs. 95%
- Didn’t hurt their specificity – 83.6% vs. 85%
- Increased their number of confident reads – 440 vs. 483
- Reduced their number of non-confident reads – 152 vs. 109
- Improved their diagnostic agreement rates – 0.68-0.79 vs. 0.83-0.97
The Takeaway
Ultromics’ stress echo reports improved the physicians’ interpretation accuracy, confidence, and reproducibility, without increasing false positives. That list of improvements satisfies most of the requirements clinicians have for AI (in addition to speed/efficiency), and it represents another solid example of echo AI’s real-world potential.
