I should point out that ECG machines that use heuristics to provide on the spot diagnoses already exist, are widespread and are way easier to implement.
So what they're doing here is using deep learning on pictures of ECGs instead of the electrical signals used by machines that provide heuristics.
The proposed use case/workflow seems to be that (somehow) someone, somewhere is using an ECG machine that doesn't provide an automatic preliminary interpretation (i.e. > 20 years old) that is (somehow) still operational and the operator doesn't know how to interpret an ECG. They would then presumably upload a picture of the ECG to a platform that can run a deep learning model on the image. This is also apparently happening in a place where a clinician is then available and echo (for confirmation, quantitative EF and etiology) as well as medications are still accessible to impact patient management/outcomes.
This reads like something done by pure CS folks who don't understand how medicine works but the authors include cardiologists.
Ignoring the glaring validity issues of a study population that only included patients who had an indication for echo, the only explanation I can see for why someone would do this is to puff up the author's h-index as this will undoubtedly be cited in several "emerging applications of AI in medicine" papers.
The proposed use case/workflow seems to be that (somehow) someone, somewhere is using an ECG machine that doesn't provide an automatic preliminary interpretation (i.e. > 20 years old) that is (somehow) still operational and the operator doesn't know how to interpret an ECG. They would then presumably upload a picture of the ECG to a platform that can run a deep learning model on the image. This is also apparently happening in a place where a clinician is then available and echo (for confirmation, quantitative EF and etiology) as well as medications are still accessible to impact patient management/outcomes.
This reads like something done by pure CS folks who don't understand how medicine works but the authors include cardiologists.
Ignoring the glaring validity issues of a study population that only included patients who had an indication for echo, the only explanation I can see for why someone would do this is to puff up the author's h-index as this will undoubtedly be cited in several "emerging applications of AI in medicine" papers.