A few months ago AliveCor launched a clinician-facing app enlisting artificial intelligence to pick up signs of atrial fibrillation before patients experience a stroke. Now it wants to apply AI to another heart condition — a fatal heart rhythm disease called Long QT syndrome to prevent sudden cardiac death. AliveCor is teaming up with Mayo Clinic to develop applications around this condition.
The deal follows Mayo Clinic’s participation in AliveCor’s Series D round in March.
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The disease name stems from the abnormal pattern associated with it on ECGs.
Although the condition can be inherited and acquired, the inherited condition can leave up to 160,000 vulnerable to the disease. A collaboration with the Mayo Clinic puts together AliveCor’s FDA-cleared smartphone-enabled electrocardiogram (ECG) device Kardia Mobile and patented algorithms with Mayo Clinic’s experts, according to a news release. The idea is to prevent needless sudden deaths among children and young adult athletes. LQTS causes 3,000 to 4,000 deaths each year, according to data from the National Institutes of Health.
As AliveCor sought to demonstrate with the launch of its clinician-facing app for Afib, AI can be used to help analyze patient data such as weight, activity, and blood pressure to personalize heart profiles of patients. Like its use of Afib as a red flag for stroke risk, the company wants to identify patient data that can be analyzed to reveal patterns associated with it so that can produce red flags for patients with LQTS and spur earlier intervention.
Through this collaboration, new methods and techniques to detect LQTS will be developed for AliveCor’s Kardia Mobile device, the news release noted. The point is to produce those red flags between doctor visits and identify the onset of the condition in enough time to put preventive measures into action.
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