The feasibility of early detecting coronary artery disease using deep learning-based algorithm based on electrocardiography

Background: Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality, yet it is frequently asymptomatic in the early stages and hence goes undetected. Objective: We aimed to develop a novel artificial intelligence-based approach for early detection of CAD patients based solely on electrocardiogram (ECG). Methods: This study included patients with suspected CAD who had standard 10-s resting 12-lead ECGs and coronary computed tomography angiography (cCTA) results within 4 weeks or less. The ECG and cCTA data from the same patient were matched based on their hospitalization or outpatient ID. All matched data pairs were then randomly divided into training, validation dataset for model development based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and test dataset for model evaluation. The accuracy (Acc), specificity (Spec), sensitivity (Sen), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the model were calculated by using the test dataset. Results: In the test dataset, the model for detecting CAD achieved an AUC of 0.75 (95% CI, 0.73 to 0.78) with an accuracy of 70.0%. Using the optimal cut-off point, the CAD detection model had sensitivity of 68.7%, specificity of 70.9%, positive predictive value (PPV) of 61.2%, and negative predictive value (NPV) of 77.2%. Our study demonstrates that a well-trained CNN model based solely on ECG could be considered an efficient, low-cost, and noninvasive method of assisting in CAD detection.