Performance of off-the-shelf machine learning architectures and biases in low left ventricular ejection fraction detection.

Background: Artificial intelligence-machine learning (AI-ML) has demonstrated the ability to extract clinically useful information from electrocardiograms (ECGs) not available using traditional interpretation methods. There exists an extensive body of AI-ML research in fields outside of cardiology including several open-source AI-ML architectures that can be translated to new problems in an "off-the-shelf" manner.

Objective: We sought to address the limited investigation of which if any of these off-the-shelf architectures could be useful in ECG analysis as well as how and when these AI-ML approaches fail.

Methods: We applied 6 off-the-shelf AI-ML architectures to detect low left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) in a cohort of ECGs from 24,868 patients. We assessed LVEF classification and explored patient characteristics associated with inaccurate (false positive or false negative) LVEF prediction.

Results: We found that all of these network architectures produced LVEF detection area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve values above 0.9 (averaged over 5 instances per network), with the ResNet 18 network performing the highest (average area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of 0.917). We also observed that some patient-specific characteristics such as race, sex, and presence of several comorbidities were associated with lower LVEF prediction performance.

Conclusions: This demonstrates the ability of off-the-shelf AI-ML architectures to detect clinically useful information from ECGs with performance matching contemporary custom-build AI-ML architectures. We also highlighted the presence of possible biases in these AI-ML approaches in the context of patient characteristics. These findings should be considered in the pursuit of efficient and equitable deployment of AI-ML technologies moving forward.