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AI-ECG for MI, Dual-Energy Ablation, and AI Funding
By Viktor Zarev, Virginia Hunt
September 14, 2026
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Together with
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“We can take care of everyone while ensuring the independence & principles of our profession. On the contrary, the corporate takeover of medical practice is the real threat to the ethics of our work, not Medicare-for-All.”
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Adam Gaffney, MD on the current debate among physicians around Medicare-for-All.
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Whether you’re looking to start your own cardiac CT program, or just want some best practices for the modality, our upcoming webinar on Friday 09/25 at 2:00 pm ET is perfect for expanding your knowledge on cardiology’s fastest growing imaging tool. Reserve your seat to hear from Dr. Alberto Morales, Kimberly Hatch, and Karthick Nalladevan on the key things to consider when working with cardiac CT.
Speaking of diagnostic modalities, today’s top story is an example of a technology that can take a widely available one like ECG to the next level.
Thanks for reading,
Vik
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Many heart attack patients still miss the window for life-saving treatment because of diagnostic delays, but that’s changing with the FDA’s De Novo authorization of Powerful Medical’s Queen of Hearts AI-ECG model that detects STEMI and its harder-to-spot equivalents.
- Queen of Hearts flags both classic STEMI and rarer STEMI equivalents like hyperacute T waves and posterior MI.
- Its authorization creates a new FDA device classification for AI-ECG models targeting acute, life-threatening cardiovascular diagnoses.
As the first software specifically for AI-ECG analysis of urgent acute coronary syndromes, this new authorization goes beyond basic detection.
- The intended use now includes triage, prioritization, and notifying the right cardiology team.
- It’s deployed through Powerful Medical’s PMcardio platform, which embeds the model into existing clinical workflows.
Powerful Medical also gets a gold star for the data backing Queen of Hearts, with the approval stemming from more than 20 peer-reviewed studies covering over 40,000 patients.
- That said, the registry study presented at TCT last year is credited with moving the approval needle.
- Researchers found the tool outperformed standard decision-making.
- It also massively reduced false-positive cath lab activations (7.9% with the AI vs. 41.8% without).
- The model also delivered faster STEMI recognition and shorter times to treatment.
Yet, Queen of Hearts’ biggest impact may be outside major heart centers. In fact, the tool could serve as a way to expand ECG expertise access where it’s scarcest.
- At non-PCI centers, the AI helps close the gap toward expert-level interpretation.
- It also comes with a built-in feature explaining why an ECG is flagged positive.
- That feature could help improve physicians’ own ECG-reading skills over time.
The Takeaway
Many people have talked about how AI is no longer a promise to be fulfilled in cardiology, rather it’s becoming an everyday necessity to help close the care gaps left by our healthcare and medical education systems. Queen of Hearts’ approval is an example of that sentiment and the benefits physicians can expect from AI done right.
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The VASCADE MVP XL
Sometimes EP procedures call for a venous vascular closure system that is simply bigger. Haemonetics’ VASCADE MVP XL closure system comes with 58% more collagen and a 9% larger disc compared to the VASCADE MVP system as well as an expanded indication for utilizing 10-14F inner diameter sheaths.
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Telemedicine Isn’t About Technology. It’s About People.
With temporary telehealth rules expiring, millions of Medicare patients may lose their ability to see their doctors remotely. Read why Monebo and the Alliance for Connected Care are urging Congress to make telemedicine a permanent part of the healthcare system.
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- Abbott’s Dual-Energy Ablation: Expanding the ablation field even more, the FDA approved Abbott’s TactiFlex Duo Ablation Catheter, which combines pulsed field and radiofrequency energy in a single device. With TactiFlex Duo, physicians can now use either energy type for AFib ablation while Abbott’s proprietary EnSite X system provides real-time lesion feedback. The approval rests on the FlexPulse IDE study in which 92.6% of paroxysmal AFib patients had no recurrence. It’s Abbott’s fifth major EP approval in a year.
- ARPA-H Bets Big HF AI: ARPA-H announced it will commit $62.7M to its ADVOCATE program for developing “partially autonomous AI devices” that can direct heart failure treatment. These agents would theoretically assess symptom severity, prescribe drugs, and order lab tests, with the goal of FDA authorization. The agency announced its first awards to Atman Health, UpDoc, Tempus AI, and teams from Stanford, Duke, and Kaiser Permanente, with more funding possible. The first-year commitment is $33.7M, with the remaining $29M subject to renegotiation.
- Tempus AI’s HF Care Agent: While we don’t know much about the other ARPA-H award recipients, we do know Tempus AI could earn up to $9.5M out of the total $62.7M. Those funds are earmarked for Tempus to build what it calls the first autonomous clinical AI agent for heart failure care without direct human intervention. Tempus says the patient-facing agent would manage symptoms, medications, rehab, and scheduling, building on Tempus’ existing AI products.
- ICDs in Low LVEF: New research suggests that implantable cardioverter-defibrillators don’t substantially benefit patients with compromised LVEF. The CMR GUIDE trial randomized 353 patients with CMR-identified myocardial scar and an LVEF of 36% to 50% to an ICD or a loop recorder over a median 6.3 years. This revealed that the ICD didn’t significantly reduce the composite risk of SCD or hemodynamically significant ventricular arrhythmia (7.8% vs. 9.2%). However, ICDs did cut sudden cardiac death when measured alone, with most benefit in patients under 70.
- Cancer Drug for Heart Attacks: The Phase 2 SHIELD-MI trial found that intravenous dexrazoxane, an FDA-approved oncology drug, reduced bleeding within the heart muscle in patients with severe STEMI heart attacks. Researchers gave the drug to 50 matched patients undergoing reperfusion and found that it led to a 68% reduction in hemorrhage burden, 34% smaller infarct size, and higher ejection fraction, with no serious adverse events. These results turn the usual cardio-oncology paradigm on its head, since most cancer drugs are cardiotoxic.
- A New Heart Attack Definition: We’re now on “The Fifth Universal Definition of Myocardial Infarction” with the latest version updating how heart attacks are classified for better clinical evaluation. The new approach recognizes three settings: spontaneous MI from acute coronary pathology, secondary MI from oxygen supply-demand imbalance, and procedure-related MI following percutaneous or surgical interventions.
- Spotting Coronary Inflammation Simply: Releasing a deluge of positive dada, Caristo Diagnostics showed that its newly FDA approved FAI-Score biomarker can assess coronary inflammation from non-contrast cardiac CT. This means flagging high risk regardless of calcium score. The company also published full results from its ORFAN analyses that showed an elevated FAI-Score predicted cardiovascular death even in patients lacking the usual risk factors. A third data readout also showed Caristo’s AI predicted stroke from routine CT independent of AFib.
- LDL-C Lowering Reduces Mortality: We already know Amgen’s Repatha (evolocumab) is effective, but a new VESALIUS-CV subanalysis emphasizes just how much lowering LDL-C improves overall health. For this readout, researchers analyzed 12.2k high-risk patients without history of heart attack or stroke, finding that all-cause mortality was 20% lower for those taking Repatha compared to placebo over approximately 4.5 years. That number was consistent whether the deaths were CV-related or not. Importantly, Repatha’s whole health benefit was seen for patients already on lipid-lowering therapies, too.
- An AI Screen for Pericarditis: In more AI news, researchers developed p-Cal, a browser-based AI calculator that fuses patient EHR data with 12-lead ECG results to estimate pericarditis risk, which is normally hard to diagnose. Trained on 6.5k patients (13.8% with confirmed pericarditis), the AI model outperformed ECG-only and clinical-only versions, achieving an AUC of 0.89 during testing and 0.81 on external validation. As a result, the tool could serve as a screening aid for early pericarditis detection.
- Tracing the Risk of ICIs: While immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) can help the body fight cancer, sometimes heart tissue gets caught in the crosshairs. A JAMA study tried to uncover how this happens by tracking 55 patients treated with ICIs, VEGFIs, or both. PET scans and biomarkers showed no significant increases in arterial inflammation in any group after 24 weeks of treatment. However, changes in the levels of some T-cells and cell adhesion molecules in the ICI cohort supported prioritization of endothelial/thrombotic pathways for future therapies.
- CMS TAVR Coverage Guidelines: CMS updated its national coverage determination for TAVR, making several notable changes that are sure to please valve makers. The new NCD now covers TAVR for symptomatic severe aortic stenosis without the prior coverage-with-evidence-development (CED) requirement, and extends coverage to asymptomatic severe AS under CED. The update also revises criteria around pre-procedural patient assessment, intraoperative requirements, and operator and hospital procedural volume thresholds, while maintaining the multidisciplinary heart team model and requiring an in-person evaluation by a TAVR operator.
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How Automated MRI Software Transformed Radiology Regional
Radiology Regional recently integrated automated MRI scanning software into their imaging practice imaging. Hear from their team how automating CMR scans streamlined their practice and enhanced patient care.
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Canon’s 30 Years of Caring
For over 30 years, Canon has helped advance pediatric interventional cardiology through innovation and a commitment to better care. Learn more about how and why modern pediatric cardiac angiography came to be from one of its founding members, Dr. John P. Cheatham.
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Circle CVI’s cvi42 v6.5 is Now Live!
Cardiovascular imaging plays a critical role in helping care teams with everything from prevention to procedural planning. That’s why Circle Cardiovascular Imaging released v6.5 of its cvi42 software with features like automated phase offset correction, editable plaque segmentation, and quantitative perfusion to support every aspect of CV imaging workflows.
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- PIA Medical Processes It All: Need an analysis like calcium scoring, strain or even FFR? PIA Medical began as a Core Lab and can handle creative cardiac research and clinical trials along with the full breadth of clinical analyses available today.
- Expand Your Cardiac Reporting with CCT and CMR Workflows: Cardiology imaging continues to grow in complexity, and reporting workflows must evolve to keep pace. Check out how Optum’s latest Change Healthcare Cardiology CPACS release enables cardiology teams to now report CCT and CMR studies natively within their software ecosystem.
- Heart Failure Hospitalization Doubles Risk of Cardiovascular Death: 21% of patients with symptomatic heart failure escalate to hospitalization for heart failure or cardiovascular death, and 25% of those who experience hospitalization are readmitted due to heart failure within one year of discharge. Watch Bayer’s Dr. Alanna Morris-Simon discuss heart failure hospitalizations and when to assess care plans.
- Corbotics and Us2.ai’s End-to-End Automated Echo: There’s a growing demand for cardiac imaging in the face of sonographer shortages and increasing pressure on specialist resources. That’s why Us2.ai and Corbotics are combining autonomous robotic echo acquisition with AI-powered analysis to create an end-to-end automated echocardiography workflow.
- Fujifilm’s Ultrasound for every Cardiovascular Ultrasound Environment: From academia to clinical diagnostics, versatility in cardiac ultrasound is essential. Discover why clinicians are choosing Fujifilm’s LISENDO 880 for exceptional image quality, comprehensive strain analysis, stress imaging, and innovative Virtual Contrast technology — all while delivering outstanding value.
- Merge Cardio 12.5 is Officially Available! From AI-generated echo measurements to upgraded UI and reports, Merge Cardio 12.5 brings a long list of new innovations to the table. Find out more about how Merge Cardio’s latest version streamlines workflows to make your cardiovascular service line more cost-effective and patient-centered.
- State-of-the-Art Cardiac Monitoring at Scale: Cleared for 13 different heart rhythm interpretations, AccurKardia’s AccurECG 2.0 shortens the time from an arrhythmia incident to clinical intervention. Watch here to find out how AccurKardia and Specialized Medical are teaming up to bring the AccurECG 2.0 technology to clinicians across the U.S.
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