Apollo Hospitals announced the national launch of an AI (artificial intelligence) tool to predict the 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 its speed in processing data and its accuracy in predicting the probability of a patient developing coronary disease. 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.

Dr. Prathap C Reddy, Chairman, Apollo Hospitals Group said, "The nation's economy is intricately linked to the health of the people with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) leading to loss of productivity with a consequent impact on national income.

While estimates suggest that NCDs account for an economic burden in the range of 5% to 10% of GDP, it is the chronic nature of NCDs, and their projected increase in prevalence, that will result in a growing economic impact if not addressed in time. Among the rising burden of NCDs, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) figure at the top. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the Asia Pacific, and it's a problem that will only intensify as populations continue to age.

Dr Reddy further adds, "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 a proud moment for us to dedicate this AI tool to all physicians in the country."

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.