A new heart test can spot disease in just ten seconds — and it sees things that no human cardiologist can catch, no matter how many years of training they have. It might be one of the biggest quiet health breakthroughs of the year.
Developed by Imperial College London, the tool reads electrocardiograms, or ECGs, which record the electric signals the heart gives off every time it beats. For a long time, doctors have used ECGs to diagnose heart attacks and abnormal rhythms. But spotting the early signs of heart disease lurking in that data has always been beyond them. For that, patients needed a different test called an echocardiogram, and many people waited months for one — precious time lost that could have been spent on treatment.
“We looked at the ECGs to see if we could do things that are superhuman,” said Dr Arunashis Sau of Imperial. “Not things that clinicians can already do, but things that no cardiologist, no matter how expert, can do.”
In a trial involving 67,000 patients, the software correctly identified up to 81% of people with heart failure and 90% of those with heart valve disease. The findings, presented at the European Society of Cardiology’s annual congress in Munich, prompted one professor, Fu Siong Ng, to call the once-simple ECG “one of the most informative tests in medicine.” And as the British Heart Foundation’s clinical director, Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, put it: “When it comes to the heart, earlier diagnosis and treatment saves lives.”
That wasn’t the week’s only health win. In the UK, a new urine test called Galeas correctly flagged 92.2% of bladder cancer cases in a trial of 964 patients across seven urology departments in England and Scotland. Led by the University of Birmingham, the study could spare many patients from an invasive procedure called a cystoscopy, which involves threading a small camera up the urethra. Because only about 8% of patients who enter the urgent diagnostic pathway actually have cancer, a simple at-home test could save the health service a huge amount of time and worry. The peer-reviewed results appeared in the journal European Urology Oncology, and bigger trials are already being planned.
Half a world away, the tiny nation of Timor-Leste achieved something huge: it became the last country in southeast Asia to wipe out trachoma, the world’s leading cause of infectious blindness. The World Health Organization validated the achievement on Thursday, crediting better sanitation, faster diagnosis, and antibiotic rollouts. WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the win was “a significant step towards our global target of eliminating trachoma worldwide by 2030.”
For millions of people, these advances turn a race against time into a head start. And with each new tool — a smarter scan, a gentler test, a disease defeated — the future of medicine looks a little less scary and a lot more hopeful.