Structural heart disease, including valve disease, congenital heart disease, and other issues that impair heart function, affects millions of people worldwide. Yet in the absence of a routine, affordable screening test, many structural heart problems go undetected until significant function has been lost.

“We have colonoscopies, we have mammograms, but we have no equivalents for most forms of heart disease,” says Pierre Elias, assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and medical director for artificial intelligence at NewYork-Presbyterian.

Elias and researchers at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian developed an AI-powered screening tool, EchoNext, that analyzes ordinary electrocardiogram (ECG) data to identify patients who should have an ultrasound (echocardiogram), a non-invasive test that is used to diagnose structural heart problems.