Heart attack detection AI Corti to expand trials in Europe

AI startup Corti today announced it will expand its service for the detection of cardiac arrest to four additional cities in Europe later this year as part of a partnership with the European Emergency Number Association (EENA).

This will be Corti’s first use outside of Copenhagen after being adopted by Copenhagen Emergency Medical Services, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

Based in Brussels, the EENA is a nonprofit with member organizations from 80 countries around the world. Cities to take part in the Corti pilot program will be selected in June. Rollout in each city will be preceded by a testing period — before the service is used by medical personnel — but trials are planned from late summer to spring 2019, the company said in a statement provided to VentureBeat.

Corti can act as a kind of digital assistant for emergency call operators as it listens for words and common characteristics that tend to appear in emergency phone calls involving cardiac events. Neural networks listen in real time for verbal and nonverbal cues — like breathing and tone of voice — to shape Corti’s decision-making process.

Analysis released today of 161,000 emergency calls that took place in Copenhagen in 2014, including more than 2,000 cardiac arrest incidents, found that Corti is 93 percent accurate in its identification of cardiac arrest events, compared to 73 percent for human emergency call operators. Corti was also on average able to recognize a cardiac arrest event 30 seconds faster than emergency call operators.

The new comparison of Corti to human operators builds upon initial studies conducted on a smaller scale.

Heart attacks are the leading cause of death on the planet, killing 800,000 people each year in the United States alone, according to the American Heart Association.

Additional announcements about Corti’s expansion to international markets will be made later this year, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.