Artificial intelligence (AI) has tremendous potential to transform cardiovascular care in several key areas, from discovery to practice, according to a JACC State-of-the-Art Review published June 24, with innovations across novel diagnostic modalities, digital native biomarkers of disease and high-performing tools to evaluate care quality and predict clinical outcomes.

In their review, Rohan Khera, MD, FACC, Eric J. Topol, MD, et al., discuss the current landscape of innovation in AI for cardiovascular care, including disease diagnosis, digital biomarkers of disease risk and novel approaches to disease prognostication; the future of AI in care delivery, including locally adapted, continually learning AI tools, AI-augmented clinical encounters, AI-enabled high-quality community care, and democratized global cardiovascular care; and specific challenges to address for realizing an AI-powered future in cardiovascular care, including addressing data privacy and security, working to achieve interoperability across health systems and communities at large, and enabling the appropriate regulatory models.

They also summarize the landscape of AI innovations in cardiovascular discovery, including AI for biological discoveries such as mechanistic inference and drug design, AI for procession therapeutics such as expanding the role of large-scale genomics and AI for clinical discovery such as personalized inference from clinical trials. Khera, et al., describe future cardiovascular optimization, such as highly individualized targeted therapeutic selection, and design and acceleration of evidence translation through AI-powered clinical trials, as well as challenges to address to accelerate the future of AI-powered cardiovascular discovery, including how to evolve evidence-generation and regulation to evaluate personalization and how to address health equity, bias and barriers to implementation.

Regarding the issue of access to care that can be limited, they write that AI-driven innovation can be used to change the paradigm and "reach people where they live." They write, "The path to this future requires equitable and regulated adoption that prioritizes fairness, equity, safety and partnerships with innovators as well as our communities and society."

"Over the next decade, we envision an AI-propelled future in which the cardiovascular diagnostic and therapeutic landscape will effective leverage multimodal data at the point of care," they write. They also note that innovations in biomedical discovery and cardiovascular research are "set to make the future of cardiovascular care more personalized, precise, and effective."