A late-breaking session at AHA 2024 highlighted new research focusing on "Smart Cardiology" innovations, including artificial intelligence (AI), aimed at improving heart health.

In the PHARM-HF A&F study, pharmacists in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) System who received feedback on their patients' heart failure medication rates, along with educational tools and targeted information, increased the frequency of their patient interactions and prescribed more heart failure medication adjustments.

"In the VHA, primary care pharmacists can provide medication counseling, necessary monitoring and they can independently prescribe indicated therapies," explained lead study author Alexander Tarlochan Singh Sandhu, MD, MS, FACC. He said that pharmacists who were audited and received feedback as part of the study were more likely to identify patients who would benefit from medication adjustment, set up new appointments with patients to adjust heart failure medications and adjust heart failure medication therapy during appointments.

"This shows one approach to increasing the use of pharmacists to improve heart failure medication use, and it may also be applicable to other chronic diseases," Sandhu said. "This is a major opportunity to improve health for more patients, especially in a system like the [VHA] Healthcare System with a large, robust network of pharmacists nationwide."

In another study – SEISMIC-HF I – researchers found that a machine learning algorithm for estimating pulmonary capillary wedge pressure in a diverse heart failure population, using signals captured by a noninvasive device, may offer comparable accuracy to existing invasive methods.

"The results provide an important step towards enabling widespread hemodynamic-guided remote management of heart failure patients," said Liviu Klen, MD, MS, when presenting the findings.

In the randomized crossover AI-ECHO trial, researchers found that an AI-based automatic analysis tool for echocardiography could streamline the daily examination workflow of sonographers in real-world clinical practice while maintaining quality.

According to researchers, AI assistance significantly reduced the time per examination and increased the average number of examinations per day. Additionally, despite the higher number of examinations, sonographers reported less mental fatigue and were able to focus more on image acquisition.

Similarly, a new software program using AI to read echocardiograms called PanEcho, may reduce the wait times for results and lead to more timely medical care. According to researchers, PanEcho is the first AI system to automatically assess all key areas of heart health from echocardiograms with images from multiple views and identify which views are most relevant for each imaging task.

"PanEcho has the potential to be used in simplified, AI-assisted screening echocardiograms," said Gregory Holste, MSE. "In settings where expert readers may not be readily accessible, PanEcho could rapidly rule out abnormalities that would otherwise require urgent referral."