Artificial intelligence-enabled classification of hypertrophic heart diseases using electrocardiograms

Differentiating among cardiac diseases associated with left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) informs diagnosis and clinical care.

To evaluate if artificial intelligence-enabled analysis of the 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) facilitates automated detection and classification of LVH.

We used a pretrained convolutional neural network to derive numerical representations of 12-lead ECG waveforms from patients in a multi-institutional healthcare system who had cardiac diseases associated with LVH (n = 50,709), including cardiac amyloidosis (n = 304), hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (n = 1056), hypertension (n = 20,802), aortic stenosis (n = 446), and other causes (n = 4766). We then regressed LVH etiologies relative to no LVH on age, sex, and the numerical 12-lead representations using logistic regression ("LVH-Net"). To assess deep learning model performance on single-lead data analogous to mobile ECGs, we also developed 2 single-lead deep learning models by training models on lead I ("LVH-Net Lead I") or lead II ("LVH-Net Lead II") from the 12-lead ECG. We compared the performance of the LVH-Net models to alternative models fit on (1) age, sex, and standard ECG measures, and (2) clinical ECG-based rules for diagnosing LVH.

The areas under the receiver operator characteristic curve of LVH-Net by specific LVH etiology were cardiac amyloidosis 0.95 [95% CI, 0.93-0.97], hypertrophic cardiomyopathy 0.92 [95% CI, 0.90-0.94], aortic stenosis LVH 0.90 [95% CI, 0.88-0.92], hypertensive LVH 0.76 [95% CI, 0.76-0.77], and other LVH 0.69 [95% CI 0.68-0.71]. The single-lead models also discriminated LVH etiologies well.

An artificial intelligence-enabled ECG model is favorable for detection and classification of LVH and outperforms clinical ECG-based rules.