The science will never stop, because that is actually the driver of the company. Beállítások

[miniming]

The science will never stop, because that is actually the driver of the company.

James K. Min, Cleerly
Why is heart disease—the silent killer responsible for 1 in 4 deaths in the U.S.—so difficult to diagnose? It mostly comes down to a lack of information. Cholesterol is used as a proxy, but there’s an 80% overlap of cholesterol levels for people who do and don’t have heart attacks, says Min. It’s not until a patient shows up with chest pain that doctors order the imaging needed to see if there’s reduced blood flood due to narrowing of the arteries. This happens when there is a build up of fatty deposits, or plaque, on the artery walls. This diagnostic process is “backwards,” says Min. “We looked at the end stage phenomenon, but we never actually had tools to be able to characterize the disease.”

Both research and technology have come a long way since Min started practicing medicine more than two decades ago. In 2003, he saw the first images from a 4-slice CT scan, with each slice representing a cross-sectional picture of the heart. “When I saw that scan, I thought this is going to fundamentally change our understanding of vascular biology,” he says. Today there are CT machines that record 640-slice scans.

As a researcher, Min and his team spent years going through thousands of CT scans to tag and identify certain characteristics and then apply machine learning to start identifying common patterns. For example, the hypothesis going into a study published in 2019 was the more narrow and blocked a person’s arteries were, the more likely he or she would be to experience a heart attack, says Min. But the results were actually quite surprising—it wasn’t the amount, but rather the type of plaque that was the biggest risk factor. Patients who experienced heart attacks were much more likely to have gunky, low density cholesterol-filled plaque as opposed to hard calcifications, he says. ทดลองเล่นสล็อตฟรีทุกค่าย

This research also coincided with a bevy of new heart disease drugs hitting the market, which gave doctors alternatives to the traditional statins. “We've got this convergence, where we understand the biology from the large-scale clinical research. We've got the machine learning ability to now process all of the images to be able to present that data. And then we've got treatment options that doctors can use to actually effectively manage their patients non-invasively,” says Min.

The benefit of Cleerly’s technology is the platform will constantly be updated and refined as it learns from new information and evolving treatment options. Next up is a large multi-international registry that aims to enroll more than 200,000 patients over the next decade. “We've developed at Cleerly another few dozen algorithms to really help us better understand cardiovascular disease and patient outcomes,” says Min. “The science will never stop, because that is actually the driver of the company.”