As it turns out, the shape of your heart can tell us a lot more about your risk of heart disease than previously thought. A study conducted with the help of artificial intelligence found that a more rounded heart shape can actually indicate an organ under stress.
Cardiologists have long noted that such a form tends to appear after the onset of a heart condition. However, thanks to artificial intelligence, researchers have managed to demonstrate on a large scale that hearts of all shapes exist, even fuller and rounder ones, even regardless of a clinical diagnosis. And some of these forms can provide important clues about heart health.
Round heart, worrying state
The study, published in Med (I link it here), revealed new details about the genetic basis of cardiomyopathy, which includes conditions such as cardiac arrhythmia andcongestive heart failure. The senior authors of the study are Shoah Clarke, of the Stanford School of Medicine, e David Ouyang of the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai. The lead author of the study is Milos Vukadinovic, bioengineering student at the University of California.
Using images from UK Biobank, a large UK medical database, the researchers measured the sphericity of the left ventricle of 38.897 hearts healthy. They chose to focus on the left ventricle, normally cone-shaped, because it's the core part of the heart muscle, which does the most stressful part of the mechanical work and is especially prone to damage and heart disease.
Link between heart shape and heart disease
First, researchers have shown that increased sphericity is a risk factor for the development of cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation, or heart failure. They found that a small increase in plumpness was associated with a 47 percent increase in the development of heart disease up to 10 years later.
Next, the scientists examined the genetic data of the biobank participants, studying both markers of sphericity and those of cardiac conditions, discovering an intersection between the two. In summary? An intrinsic disease of the heart muscle, i.e. damage not suffered during a heart attack, can cause the left ventricle to become spherical. Even before heart disease manifests itself.
The presence of increased sphericity could, according to the scientists, “identify individuals with underlying molecular/cellular abnormalities that place them at greater risk of developing overt cardiomyopathy or related heart diseases, such as atrial fibrillation.”
It must be said, however, that an increase in heart sphericity does not automatically mean heart disease. Most of the sample considered did not develop any, at least in the 10 years of monitoring.
The importance of data science
If the shape of the heart becomes a basic detail collected in clinical settings, we may begin to see changes that will predict heart disease and other problems. Images of the vascular system like those used in the study can provide a huge amount of scientific clues that are not used today.
THEartificial intelligence it can really do a lot in the analysis and correlation of this enormous amount of data: it is one of the tasks for which we expect important results in the near future.
