New York — Pathway Labs has launched EchoNext, an artificial intelligence tool cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to identify patients at high risk of six structural heart conditions using standard 12-lead electrocardiograms.
The company also announced a partnership with OpenEvidence to make EchoNext available through a clinical decision-support platform used by more than 500,000 U.S. physicians.
EchoNext is designed to flag right- and left-sided heart failure, valve disease, severe hypertrophy compatible with infiltrative cardiomyopathy and pulmonary hypertension. Pathway Labs said the technology could help identify conditions that may otherwise remain undetected until patients develop symptoms.
The model was trained using more than 700,000 paired electrocardiogram and echocardiogram records from the NewYork-Presbyterian health system. It has also been evaluated in studies involving more than 20 hospitals and 500,000 patients in the United States and Canada.
“While we have mammograms and colonoscopies for cancer, we have never had an equivalent form of early detection for the most common cause of death in the world — heart disease,” said Dr. Pierre Elias, founder and CEO of Pathway Labs, as well as medical director for artificial intelligence at NewYork-Presbyterian and assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. “Through EchoNext, we are able to detect high-risk conditions that the human eye can’t and may otherwise be missed.”
Pathway Labs said a case published in Nature Medicine on June 22 described EchoNext detecting previously undiagnosed heart failure in a patient who eventually received a heart transplant. The company described it as the first peer-reviewed report of a heart transplant resulting from AI-assisted disease detection.
Through its partnership with OpenEvidence, EchoNext results will be made available to physicians through tools they already use at the point of care.
“FDA-approved AI shouldn’t sit siloed in the ivory tower while patients wait years for it to reach them. Putting EchoNext on OpenEvidence means a breakthrough in heart disease detection is available everywhere care happens, from major hospitals to community practices,” said Travis Zack, Chief Medical Officer of OpenEvidence.
Pathway Labs also raised $8.5 million in a seed financing led by AlleyCorp and Breyer Capital. The company plans to use the funding to expand deployment across health systems, build its clinical and commercial teams and support additional research and development.
“One of the most compelling opportunities in medical AI is uncovering clinically meaningful signals from data we already collect. Pathway Labs is redefining what can be discerned from one of the most widely ordered tests in medicine, the ECG, to surface structural heart disease that is otherwise imperceptible to the human eye. We’re proud to partner with Pierre and the Pathway Labs team to bring this technology into everyday clinical care,” said Dr. Morgan Cheatham, Partner and Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Breyer Capital.
Dr. Alexi Nazem, MD, General Partner at AlleyCorp, added “Pathway Labs is going to save and improve so many lives by diagnosing heart disease sooner and enabling more effective therapeutic intervention. This remarkable technology is pioneering a new type of medicine where AI enables unprecedented capabilities, detecting latent signals in standard diagnostic tests. AlleyCorp is thrilled to support these brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs as they break new ground.”
“As a second-time founder, I’ve seen how often great clinical innovation stalls at implementation,” said Rachel Katz, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Pathway Labs. “Our job with this capital is to get this into real workflows, across real health systems, at national scale.”
