Perelman School of Medicine cardiologist Rajat Deo has been studying electrocardiographic (ECG) data and cardiac rhythms for nearly two decades at Penn. He says that every second, hospitals generate “enormous streams of ECG data—electrical traces of the heart that accumulate into one of medicine’s richest, most underused archives.” For decades, most of this information had been treated as crucial in the moment, but it goes unused later.

Now, Deo and other clinicians from Penn Medicine have partnered with computer scientists at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science to change that by harnessing the power of the cardiac data that hospitals already collect.