AI tool to track vascular inflammation in Covid-19 patients

Cardiovascular complications have emerged as a key feature of Covid-19. In a new study presented at the European Society of Cardiology Conference, 2022 and published today in the Lancet Digital Health, researchers have said that direct evaluation of vascular inflammation in Covid-19 cases would pave the way for more efficient trials of new treatments and identify patients who might be at risk of long-term complications. Prof Charalambos Antoniades, British Heart Foundation (BHF), Chair of cardiovascular Medicine, University of Oxford, and lead author of the study. said that this was a novel artificial intelligence-assed image analysis platform that quantifies cytokine-driven vascular inflammation from routine CT angiograms.
What is this new platform?
This is a first study that introduces a new radio transcriptomic platform which allows us to detect those patients whose arteries are affected the virus, and help us guide interventions. We presented a new platform that uses quantitative radio transcriptomics to measure cytokine-induced vascular inflammation from routine CT angiograms of the coronary or pulmonary arteries. Quantifying cytokine-induced vascular inflammation in patients with Covid-19 is an unmet need not only for risk stratification of patients admitted to hospital to optimise management and allocation of resources, but also for informing deployment of preventive measures after hospital discharge, as viral infections have been known to increase the risk of future cardiovascular events. using a radio transcriptomic approach, we constructed a novel imaging signature, the C19-RS, which can be extracted from any CT angiogram that visualises the internal mammary arteries, and provides a quantitative measure of cytokine-induced vascular inflammation in patients with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection.
What were the key findings of the study?
The study constructed a new imaging technology based on AI that allows us to detect the degree of vascular inflammation caused Covid-19. Those patients, who do develop this inflammation in their arteries due to Covid-19, have up to eight times higher risk of dying in the hospital and need urgent steroid treatment. When steroids are given, these patients no longer experience a higher risk for mortality. We also found that vascular inflammation triggers thrombosis in Covid-19. The same AI technology can be used to predict risk in other inflammatory diseases beyond Covid-19, and it is being tested now in long-Covid cases. The study was funded the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Oxford BHF Centre of Research Excellence, Innovate UK, NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and Wellcome Trust and Onassis Foundation.
How does this approach offer opportunities for management of future outbreaks of SARS-CoV2 variants or other infectious disease outbreaks?
If a future variant of Covid causes vascular inflammation, it will be lethal as it would mean it escapes the vaccines and causes vascular damage. This technology could be used in screening for future variants or other infectious diseases which may lead to pandemics, as it evaluates the impact of a disease on the arteries in our body. This technology could be used, pending further validation, to stratify patients after they develop SARS-CoV-2 infection, and it could also potentially be applicable to various vascular inflammatory diseases, where cytokine-driven inflammation is biologically relevant.