Scientists have trained an artificial intelligence tool to predict sex and estimate age from electrocardiogram readouts. They suggest that, with further development, the tool could soon be helping doctors to assess the overall health of their patients.

An electrocardiogram, also known as an ECG or EKG, is a painless, simple test that records the electrical activity of a person's heart.

A recent paper in the journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, describes how the team developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to predict sex and estimate age from ECG data.

The researchers, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, in Rochester, MN, trained the AI tool, which is of a type known as a convolutional neural network (CNN), using ECG readouts from nearly 500,000 individuals.

When they tested the CNN's accuracy on a further 275,000 people, they found that it was very good at predicting sex but less good at predicting age. The AI tool got the sex right 90% of the time but only got the age right 72% of the time.

The team then focused on 100 people in the test batch for whom they had at least 20 years of ECG readouts.

This closer investigation revealed that the accuracy of the AI tool's age estimates depended on whether the individuals had experienced heart conditions.

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