Plaque Detection and Early Intervention with AI Innovation

Over the course of the last couple of decades, we've seen dramatic improvements in medical therapeutics. But we're also seeing a migration toward increased utilization of techniques and imaging for prevention of disease. And that's a paradigm shift.

Among the things that is the most exciting in cardiovascular disease over the recent decade or so, has been the exponential ability to image the heart in ways that we couldn't do before. Now we're able to see parts of the heart that we couldn't really see before, particularly the walls of blood vessels. And that ability to identify disease much earlier than we could before opens new doors for prevention of heart attacks.

Our current traditional methods for estimating risk have to do with population science. Those are surrogate markers, and they are valid and important in general, but sometimes they are not perfect for the individual. We're trying to migrate toward a more personalized type of medication where we're actually looking at the plaque itself, not simply a statistical marker for the likelihood of plaque.

One of the directions we're going is to try and figure out ways to detect cardiac disease early, just as we might try to detect cancer early by a mammogram or a colonoscopy. We've been fortunate having the support of our health system and our self-funded health plan with the intent that we can try and prevent heart attacks within our own employee population, which is the right thing to do and is good for our own family if you will, but also, we believe, has a return on investment in the long term by reducing the cost of health care in that population.

We're now doing cardiac CT scans and then leveraging an artificial intelligence platform, made by Cleerly, to analyze plaque in the walls of arteries, the type of plaque, but also the amount of plaque. The advantage of using artificial intelligence is the ability to pick up that plaque earlier than we could with the naked eye, but also to measure it. That measurement can become important longitudinally in guiding individualized therapy that's based on your plaque, not based on a marker of disease.

What we're doing now is based on really good science, but heretofore no one has really had the opportunity to put it together in quite the way that it's being done now, where this technique with artificial intelligence and early intervention is done prospectively to try and prevent disease. Observational studies have certainly suggested that this will work. And eventually it might become logical to do this type of testing as a prevention strategy more widely utilized. Time will tell, and whether or not the data substantiate that need.

Our hope is that this type of technology will be increasingly available to all of us.