Performance of Off-the-Shelf Machine Learning Architectures and Biases in Detection of Low Left Ventricular Ejection...

Artificial intelligence - machine learning (AI-ML) is a computational technique that has been demonstrated to be able to extract meaningful clinical information from diagnostic data that are not available using either human interpretation or more simple analysis methods. Recent developments have shown that AI-ML approaches applied to ECGs can accurately predict different patient characteristics and pathologies not detectable by expert physician readers. There is an extensive body of literature surrounding the use of AI-ML in other fields, which has given rise to an array of predefined open-source AI-ML architectures which can be translated to new problems in an "off-the-shelf" manner. Applying "off-the-shelf" AI-ML architectures to ECG-based datasets opens the door for rapid development and identification of previously unknown disease biomarkers. Despite the excellent opportunity, the ideal open-source AI-ML architecture for ECG related problems is not known. Furthermore, there has been limited investigation on how and when these AI-ML approaches fail and possible bias or disparities associated with particular network architectures. In this study, we aimed to: (1) determine if open-source, "off-the-shelf" AI-ML architectures could be trained to classify low LVEF from ECGs, (2) assess the accuracy of different AI-ML architectures compared to each other, and (3) to identify which, if any, patient characteristics are associated with poor AI-ML performance.