Hospital ECGs are mostly read by a doctor or nurse at the patient’s bedside,but now researchers are applying artificial intelligence(AI) to gather additional information from those results to improve patients care.

A research team at University of Alberta (Edmonton,Alberta,Canada;www.ualberta.ca) has developed and trained machine learning programs using a massive dataset of 1.6 million ECGs performed on 244,077 patients spanning over a period from 2007 till 2020.

The algorithm predicted the risk of death from all causes within one month,one year,and five years with an impressive 85% accuracy rate,ranking the patients into one of five categories,ranging from the lowest to the highest risk.