Investigators from Cedars-Sinai have created an artificial intelligence-enabled tool that may make it easier to predict if a person will have a heart attack.

The tool, described in The Lancet Digital Health, accurately predicted which patients would experience a heart attack in five years based on the amount and composition of plaque in arteries that supply blood to the heart.

Researchers analyzed CTA images from 1,196 people who underwent a coronary CTA at 11 sites in Australia, Germany, Japan, Scotland and the United States. The investigators trained the AI algorithm to measure plaque by having it learn from coronary CTA images, from 921 people, that already had been analyzed by trained doctors.

Finally, the investigators discovered that measurements made by the AI algorithm from CTA images accurately predicted heart attack risk within five years for 1,611 people who were part of a multicenter trial called the SCOT-HEART trial.