Mayo Clinic’s artificial intelligence spinout Anumana is taking a deeper dive into analyzing the pulsing electrical signals of the heart with a new acquisition aimed at developing software used during cardiac procedures.
First launched in April 2021 as a joint venture with medical data company nference, Anumana has now picked up NeuTrace, which focuses on programs for analyzing the heart’s electrophysiology.
The ultimate goal, according to the companies, is to provide an AI-powered platform that links nference’s work in electronic medical records with a patient’s electrocardiograms as well as cardiac electrograms that measure activity from probes placed within the heart.
At the same time, nference will gain the rights to develop NeuTrace’s data platform—designed to link together various devices and real-time AI applications during a procedure—for new uses outside cardiovascular disease.
“As new tools come on-line in the EP lab, we will need artificial intelligence more than ever,” Pierre Jais, general director of the Electrophysiology and Heart Modeling Institute in Bordeaux, France, and a medical adviser to NeuTrace, said in a release. “By pairing these intraprocedural data with ECGs and full medical records, Anumana has the opportunity for AI-tailored recommendations patient-by-patient, which would be true precision medicine.”
Anumana has previously demonstrated its ability to help analyze ECG waveforms from a diagnostic standpoint.
Developed at the Mayo Clinic, one algorithm showed it could catch subtle readings from a 12-lead ECG and screen patients for cases of low ejection fraction, where the heart muscle is struggling to expel blood and push it out to the rest of the body. In a study of more than 22,600 patients, the algorithm produced 32% more diagnoses compared to the standard of care.
Now, NeuTrace’s pipeline of software, currently under development, aims to increase the accuracy, speed and safety of electrophysiology procedures, where physicians aim to correct imbalances found in those ECG waveforms before an irregular heartbeat can progress into more severe heart disease.
“Electrophysiology and other cardiology procedures are extremely rich in data that has largely remained untapped when it comes to machine learning and deep learning techniques,” said NeuTrace co-founder K. Shivkumar, M.D., Ph.D., director of UCLA’s Cardiac Arrhythmia Center. “The techniques and products that Anumana and nference are developing, especially when integrated with NeuTrace’s in-procedure technology, are groundbreaking not only in cardiology, but also when applied to other organs such as the brain and kidney.”