Sudden cardiac arrest kills 300,000 to 400,000 Americans annually.
My friend the brilliant @kevin_volpp dropped dead
He survived (read abt it: https://tinyurl.com/ypcpdzpz)
But every year 300-400,000 in the US don't
This week: our @nature article (+A.Schubert J.Ross @m_sendhil M.Lingman) applies AI to this medical mystery
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10674-6
Users congratulated researchers on the AI study predicting sudden cardiac arrest risk published in Nature because they found the work super interesting.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
As some have observed, 100–7=93% - true!
But 7% is *annual*.
And 93%^5 (for example) = 70%
Which means a 5-year, potentially preventable mortality rate of 30%.
And 86% of high-risk people are unsuspected based on current state of the art (LVEF)
Everything my brilliant colleague @oziadias works on, I learn tremendously from. This is no exception!
AI can help us *do* useful things in medicine – great!
Below - one such thing, from our @nature paper: - AI can flag people at high risk of dropping dead - and help us decide who gets implanted defibrillators
But what can we *learn* from AI?
If you made it this far: Separate thread on “AI for science” part of the paper - coming up next
If you're interested in your own ECG prediction... we're working on doing that in a safe and responsible way
Leave us your email here https://eccentric.health/ecg-interest/
Important check: can we predict for non-Swedish people? Yes.
In the US: - high-risk patients: *25% annual rate* ventricular arrhythmias – proximal cause of sudden death – in EHRs.
In Taiwan: model distinguishes - future adjudicated arrhythmic arrests - vs. controls
But… defibrillators have existed since 1980 – why are people still dying?
Because we’re bad at predicting who needs one.
Exhibit A: 3-400,000 preventable deaths per year
Exhibit B: 2/3 defibrillators never fire – because we implant them in people who turn out to be low risk.
What we do:
Pull all 440,000 ECGs in a Swedish region
Why ECGs? - They’re cheap and easy to do - They contain a lot of signal about your heart rhythm
Why Sweden? - Because we can link ECGs to high-quality death certificates (Swedes are *very* good at death certificates)
Sudden death is a great problem for AI
There's a direct line from predictions to saving lives.
If you knew you were going to drop dead from an arrhythmia, you'd want an implanted defibrillator
These devices are a miracle. They detect and terminate arrhythmias before they kill.
Are high-risk deaths preventable?
Lots of caveats (it's observational data; we’re working on a RCT!)
But interesting fact:
There’s one group the model does *terribly* in: those with defibrillators.
They die *way* less than they “should”
Suggests defibrillators could work
Then we build a deep-learning model that looks at the ECG waveforms
It learns the difference between ECGs - from people who had sudden cardiac death - vs. people who didn’t.
It flags a high risk group (2% of our sample)
with a *7% risk* of dropping dead in the next year
@oziadias @kevin_volpp @Nature @m_sendhil Congrats Ziad - super interesting!
