AI tools could transform future heart and kidney disease care

AI has an important role to play in the future of healthcare, offering doctors and healthcare professionals the ability to improve patient care and automate labour-intensive tasks.

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is playing a leading role in using AI for patient benefit, winning the prestigious Future NHS Award at the NHS Parliamentary Awards for an AI cardiac diagnostic tool that can carry our complicated measurements of the heart in a few seconds.

The technology could be a game-changer in future cardiovascular care, speeding up diagnosis and giving greater insights in the inner workings of the heart.

Without the AI tool, doctors must print out and physically draw on MRI heart scan images to determine heart function. This is a lengthy and laborious process.

Another innovative AI tool has been shown to accurately measure kidney size 6-7 times faster than human expert analysts.

Developed by Dr Jonathan Taylor, Senior Medical Physicist and Professor Albert Ong, Consultant Nephrologist and Clinical Lead for Genetics at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, the tool has been in use at the 3D lab at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals since 2022 and could play a pivotal role in predicting when a person’s kidneys might fail.