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A team from Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has tested an artificial intelligence-powered stethoscope that can detect major heart conditions in just seconds. The device, developed by the US company Eko Health, replaces the traditional chest piece with a small microphone that captures heart sounds and blood flow patterns too subtle for the human ear. It also performs an electrocardiogram (ECG) and sends the data to the cloud, where AI trained on tens of thousands of patient records analyzes it.
The study involved more than 12,000 patients across 96 GP surgeries in west and north-west London. Researchers compared them to patients from 109 surgeries without the technology. The AI stethoscope was able to identify heart failure, abnormal heart rhythms, and heart valve disease with much higher accuracy. For example, heart failure was detected more than twice as often, while irregular rhythms were found 3.5 times more frequently.
Dr. Sonya Babu-Narayan from the British Heart Foundation called it a 21st-century upgrade to the 200-year-old stethoscope, stressing the importance of earlier diagnoses. Results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology congress in Madrid. Plans are already underway to roll out the technology across more regions in the UK.
