September 29, 2021: On the occasion of World Heart Day today, Apollo Hospitals has launched an AI (artificial intelligence) tool to predict risk of cardiovascular disease.
The Apollo AI-powered Cardiovascular Disease Risk tool will help healthcare providers to predict the risk of cardiac disease in their patients and initiate intervention early enough to make a real difference.
The cardiac risk scoring tool is remarkable for the speed in processing data and its accuracy at predicting the probability of a patient developing coronary disease, said  Dr. Prathap C Reddy, Chairman, Apollo Hospitals Group.
Using the tool, physicians will be enabled to deliver proactive, pre-emptive and preventive care for at-risk individuals, improving lives while mitigating future pressure on healthcare systems.  
While some predictive tools do exist to help physicians understand the probability of their patients developing heart disease, most of these are based on Western data sets and don’t take regional risk variations into account. This impacts their accuracy when applied in an Indian context. The Apollo AI-powered Cardiovascular Disease Risk tool will change that and put the knowledge and the means to predict and prevent heart disease in the physician’s hands. Available till now only to Apollo’s physicians, it is now offered to all physicians in the country, freely for one year.
The team at Apollo Hospitals collected more than ten years of data relating to 400,000 individuals across the country. Then, they used Microsoft Azure to turn that anonymized data into actionable insights that data scientists and clinicians could use to train machine learning models. The tool has been validated using data from the Maastricht Study, a long-term cohort health study in the Maastricht region and from the Heart+Vascular Center at Maastricht University Medical Center, Netherlands. 
Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals Group said, “The AI tool to predict and prevent heart disease is the fruition of many years of research and development and stands testament to Apollo Hospitals’ technological prowess. Apollo’s AI-powered Cardiovascular Disease Risk Score is specifically for use in the Indian population, so physicians can better predict the risk of cardiac disease in their patients. The tool is built on algorithms based on ten years of anonymized data relating to around 400,000 individuals across the country collected by the team at Apollo Hospitals.  The tool has also been validated internationally using federated learning through Microsoft Azure Platform. Doctors across the Apollo network have been leveraging this AI-powered tool for three years to predict risk of cardiovascular disease and drive preventive cardiac care across the country. With this launch of the AI tool to predict risk of heart disease, we will be able to help achieve the World Health Organization’s goal of reducing the risk of premature mortality from non-communicable diseases, including CVDs, by 25% by 2025.” 
The AI-powered tool delivers a more accurate CVD risk score using algorithms specifically for the Indian population and helps in developing standardised care regimens. Developed using a combination of applied AI and clinical expertise on a large sample of retrospective data on health checks and coronary events, the tool delivers a risk score that takes into account all contributing factors including lifestyle attributes such as diet, tobacco & smoking preferences and physical activity as well as psychological stress and anxiety as reflected via rate of respiration, and hypertension. The risk is categorized into High, Moderate and Minimal. The tool also gives insights on the risk contributors that can be modified to improve the score. This enables physicians to give a more holistic advice to their patients with specific insights for lifestyle modification.