Nearly 10 percent of adults over the age of 65 suffer from some kind of congestive heart failure (CHF). There are a variety of different causes for CHF but the fundamental chronic condition generally results from the heart being unable to pump blood effectively through the body.
X-rays, blood tests, and ultrasounds all offer clinicians useful ways to diagnose CHF, but one of the more common methods involves using electrocardiogram (ECG) signals to determine heart rate variability over a number of minutes, or even multiple measurements over days. An impressive new approach has now been demonstrated, using a convolutional neural network (CNN) that can identify CHF nearly instantly by checking ECG data from just one heartbeat