On 5 February, the AI4HF consortium met in Lisbon to reflect on the progress as the EU project moves towards its final year, and to think together about what really needs our attention next.
Research Director Miriam Cabrita represented SHINE 2Europe and highlights that two priorities became very clear: working on a sustainability plan for local patient groups together with patients and hospital teams in the Netherlands, Czechia, Tanzania, Peru, and Spain; and evaluating the socio-ethical implications of using AI in heart failure care. This means going back to the patients and clinicians who shared their needs, expectations, and concerns with us in 2023/2024.
As the project coordinator Folkert Asselbergs nicely put it, the first years were about building the foundations. Now we have the tools, and just as importantly, the relationships, to turn this work into something that can truly make a difference.
The ambitious objective of the AI4HF project is to co-design, develop, evaluate and exploit an integrative and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) solution for personalised heart failure risk assessment, trained from large, complementary multi-source cardiovascular data, including cardiac imaging, cardiac biomarkers, electrocardiography (ECG) and information from clinical reports.
The AI4HF technology will enable to dissect the precise characteristics of each HF patient, then predict the patient’s likely outcomes at an early stage to enable timely and personalised care. The project will put great emphasis on the concepts of trustworthy and inter-disciplinary AI, to ensure that the developed AI technology is trusted, approved and deployed in the real world for the benefit of patients, cardiologists, physicians, care providers and society at large.
AI4HF project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 101080430. The clinical centers involved in the project are: Amsterdam UMC, UMC Utrecht, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), Vall d’Hebron Institute of Research (VHIR) – Vall d’Hebron Institut de Recerca, St. Anne’s University Hospital Brno, CITBM – Centro de Investigaciones Tecnológicas, Biomédicas y Medioambientales, ULS Lisboa Ocidental, Saint Antonius Ziekenhuis, Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences (Mwanza).