Artificial intelligence, fetal echocardiography, and congenital heart disease

Thomas G. Day*, Bernhard Kainz, Jo Hajnal, Reza Razavi, John M. Simpson

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

There has been a recent explosion in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), which is now part of our everyday lives. Uptake in medicine has been more limited, although in several fields there have been encouraging results showing excellent performance when AI is used to assist in a well-defined medical task. Most of this work has been performed using retrospective data, and there have been few clinical trials published using prospective data. This review focuses on the potential uses of AI in the field of fetal cardiology. Ultrasound of the fetal heart is highly specific and sensitive in experienced hands, but despite this there is significant room for improvement in the rates of prenatal diagnosis of congenital heart disease in most countries. AI may be one way of improving this. Other potential applications in fetal cardiology include the provision of more accurate prognoses for individuals, and automatic quantification of various metrics including cardiac function. However, there are also ethical and governance concerns. These will need to be overcome before AI can be widely accepted in mainstream use. It is likely that a familiarity of the uses, and pitfalls, of AI will soon be mandatory for many healthcare professionals working in fetal cardiology.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)733-742
Number of pages10
JournalPrenatal Diagnosis
Volume41
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Prenatal Diagnosis published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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