Predicting post-operative right ventricular failure using video-based deep learning

Despite progressive improvements over the decades, the rich temporally resolved data in an echocardiogram remain underutilized. Human assessments reduce the complex patterns of cardiac wall motion, to a small list of measurements of heart function. All modern echocardiography artificial intelligence (AI) systems are similarly limited by design - automating measurements of the same reductionist metrics rather than utilizing the embedded wealth of data. This underutilization is most evident where clinical decision making is guided by subjective assessments of disease acuity. Predicting the likelihood of developing post-operative right ventricular failure (RV failure) in the setting of mechanical circulatory support is one such example. Here we describe a video AI system trained to predict post-operative RV failure using the full spatiotemporal density of information in pre-operative echocardiography. We achieve an AUC of 0.729, and show that this ML system significantly outperforms a team of human experts at the same task on independent evaluation. The echocardiogram allows for a comprehensive assessment of the cardiac musculature and valves, but its rich temporally resolved data remain underutilized. Here, the authors develop a video AI system trained to predict post-operative right ventricular failure.