Diagnosing Severe Low-Gradient vs Moderate Aortic Stenosis with Artificial Intelligence Based on Echocardiography Images

Diagnosis of aortic valve stenosis (AS) is performed manually by a physician experienced in echocardiography imaging. A specific subtype of AS, a severe low-gradient AS, is the most challenging one in terms of differentiating it from the moderate AS. In this study, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based model was used to diagnose the severe low-gradient AS in a fully automatic manner. Data from 158 consecutive patients undergoing echocardiography examination to assess AS severity were used. The obtained performance of our fully automatic approach was AUC = 0.719, 95% confidence interval, 0.640-0.798. It is an important step towards a comprehensive and automatic, image-only-based clinical decision support system for determining the presence of AS and its severity, especially in AS subtypes, such as low-gradient AS.