In the 21st century, the management of heart failure has become decidedly less medieval: Today, patients undergo a combination of healthy lifestyle changes, prescription of medications, and sometimes use pacemakers. Yet heart failure remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, placing a substantial burden on health care systems across the globe.

“About half of the people diagnosed with heart failure will die within five years of diagnosis,” says Teya Bergamaschi, an MIT Ph.D. student in the lab of Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor Collin Stultz and the co-first author of a new paper introducing a deep learning model for predicting heart failure. “Understanding how a patient will fare after hospitalization is really important in allocating finite resources.”