Artificial intelligence in cardiology: Concepts, tools and challenges-“the horse is the one who runs, you must be the jockey”

Abstract

The recent advances at hardware level and the increasing requirement of personalization of care associated with the urgent needs of value creation for the patients has helped Artificial Intelligence (AI) to promote a significant paradigm shift in the most diverse areas of medical knowledge, particularly in Cardiology, for its ability to support decision-making and improve diagnostic and prognostic performance. In this context, the present work does a non-systematic review of the main papers published on AI in Cardiology, focusing on its main applications, potential impacts and challenges. Basically, AI is the product of the combination of sophisticated mathematical models and computation, which allows the development of complex algorithms capable of emulating human intelligence. All this process starts with the construction of a database representative of the problem that one wishes to study – adequately collected and processed– called healthy data. This step is of fundamental importance, as the algorithms will probably not perform well if this prerequisite is not obtained: "garbage in, garbage out".