It has been stressed many times the importance of going for regular checkups, especially if you’re older. This is because checkups can help doctors detect possible health problems, which means that you might be able to catch certain things early, thus decreasing the chances of it affecting you in a major way, like being able to predict if you’re at risk for a heart attack.
However since doctors are only human, sometimes they might miss certain things, which is why researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK have developed (via Engadget) a machine learning algorithm that can predict a heart attack better than a human doctor can, meaning that there is the potential that it could save more lives.
Based on the system that the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association has set out, it can guess a person’s risk of a heart attack about 72.8% of the time, but with AI and machine learning, it raised that number to 74.5% to 76.4%. Out of the 83,000 patient set of test records, this means that an additional 355 lives could have been saved.
This system is still a work in progress and the researchers are hoping to include other factors in the future, such as lifestyle and genetics that will hopefully improve upon its accuracy.
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