London laboratory uses artificial intelligence to help detect and treat heart disease

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Artificial intelligence is being used and tested in many different medical fields, including in the search for how to detect and treat heart disease. 

In the U.K., they’re using AI to find cardiovascular disease faster and earlier, when it’s easier to treat.

Under a microscope, these lab-grown cells show a healthy beating heart. 

 While these cells show one that’s damaged.

Doctors can see the difference and hope artificial intelligence will too, and more quickly.

“As the hearts in the dish age, we can predict which of these will age healthily versus which of these will age detrimentally,” said Prashant Jay Ruchaya, a cardiovascular scientist at the University of East London.

At this London lab, miniature stem cell hearts are helping scientists explore how cells in the heart become faulty as we age.

“The way they contract is very important because the function of the heart is to pump blood around the body,” Ruchaya said.

By utilizing AI, researchers at the University of East London hope to accelerate diagnosis, treatment and prevention for age-related heart disease.

“Because once they do become damaged, it’s very hard for that to become a reversible process,” according to Ruchaya.

Researchers are training AI to recognize the way the heart beats in minute detail to detect  changes in the shape of the cells better than a doctor.

“So if we can identify ways of trying to remove those detrimental cardiac heart cells, we’re hopefully able to keep the heart functioning as we want it to,” Ruchaya said.

U.K. researchers said the tiny lab-grown hearts are made from human stem cells and destroyed after 28 days.

They’re hoping to eventually change the trend of heart disease being the leading cause of death.