An AI Stethoscope Now Finds Twice as Much Heart Failure

In a 12,725-patient Lancet trial it doubled diagnoses, but two of every three flags were false and 70% of practices stopped or rarely used it within a year.

TL;DR

Star Trek imagined the medical tricorder, a handheld device that diagnoses at a glance. A real version of that idea has now been tested at scale: an AI-equipped stethoscope that listens to the heart and flags likely heart failure. In a trial of 12,725 patients published in the Lancet, people checked with it were about twice as likely to be diagnosed. That is the future arriving in a doctor's pocket. But the same trial shows what stands in the way. Two of every three people it flagged did not have heart failure, and a year later 70% of the practices had stopped using it or rarely did. The machine can find hidden disease. The open question is whether it can do so without burying doctors in false alarms.

Below the line, for paid subscribers: The full story: where it stands, how we got here and what's dated next; our Odds board on 3 milestones, starting with "A published study explains why most practices stopped using the AI stethoscope by 2028"; and every source.