Declan O’Regan is the BHF Professor of Cardiovascular AI at Imperial College London.
Professor Declan O’Regan and his team are using artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionise heart health. By analysing large health data sets, the team aim to understand how heart disease progresses in different people, with the goal of predicting health outcomes and developing personalised treatments.
The power of AI
AI is a technology that enables machines, particularly computers, to mimic human intelligence. These machines can learn from data to make decisions or predictions.
AI can help find hidden patterns in massive amounts of data that would otherwise be impossible for the human brain to spot. It could therefore act as a catalyst for scientific breakthroughs, bringing benefits to both patients and health care professionals.
With the field of AI evolving at pace, Professor O’Regan and his team want to harness the power of AI to better understand our heart health and investigate how our genes and the environment around us affect our hearts.
With access to large data sets which include heart scans, genetics, and patient outcome data, they hope AI can help understand how heart disease progresses in different people. Their approach could transform prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease.
Learning what makes our hearts different
As we get older, we are more likely to develop long-term conditions, such as cardiovascular disease. However, we all age differently, and some of us are more likely to have heart problems than others. This can be down to our genes as well as the environment we live in.
Professor O’Regan hopes that understanding these differences could help identify new treatments to prolong healthy living and select patients who are most likely to benefit from treatment.
To do this, the team will use AI to analyse thousands of heart scans to build a detailed picture of the heart in large populations. This is done by a method called ‘computer vision’, where a computer will be taught how to find important details in heart images, like changes to the hearts structure, that could show it’s under stress.
Professor O’Regan is an expert in cardiovascular imaging, and has previously developed algorithms that can create 3D ‘moving’ images of the heart. This will help the team to understand how genetics can affect the structure and function of the heart.
A new hope for heart health
7.6 million people in the UK are living with cardiovascular disease, and the conditions are responsible for 480 deaths every day. Professor O’Regan’s work could help uncover disease mechanisms, personalise treatments, and predict clinical outcomes.
By identifying people that are more likely to have heart problems in the future, and developing therapies to slow heart aging, this research could help people live longer, healthier lives.