A Penn Medicine–led team has developed a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence system that interprets cardiac MRI scans with performance approaching expert clinicians. Trained on more than 300,000 MRI video clips from roughly 20,000 patients, the model can assess heart function and diagnose dozens of diseases using only non-contrast imaging. The work was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

“Cardiac MRI is one of the most powerful tools available to cardiologists, but interpreting these scans requires rare expertise, and many hospitals—especially community and rural centers—lack specialists who regularly read complex cardiac MRI studies,” said Rohan Shad, MD, an integrated cardiothoracic surgery resident in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the study.