Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD), are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. As a non-invasive, low-risk imaging procedure, coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) can efficiently diagnose and analyze stenoses and plaques in the coronary arteries.
The radiologist needs to perform complex image post-processing and reconstruction operations on coronary CTA scan data to diagnose coronary heart disease accurately. The coronary arteries have a complex structure and numerous branches. Conventional 3D-reconstruction requires considerable manual operation, which normally takes 15 to 20 mins for a single case. This time-consuming and labor-intensive procedure seriously affects the efficiency of diagnosis by radiologists and limits the daily patient throughput.

Kiang Wu Hospital has deployed multiple AI modules of SenseCare Smart Health Platform to support its radiologists through daily diagnosis. Leveraging SenseTime’s deep-learning and image post-processing technology, SenseCare Cardiac significantly reduces the workload of manual operations by providing fast and fully automatic 3D reconstruction. It also assists doctors to detect stenosis quickly and characterize plaques (i.e., non-calcified, calcified, mixed plaques) in great detail, and generates automatic films and reports in multiple formats. With the help of SenseCare Cardiac, the case volume of cardiac diagnoses in Kiang Wu Hospital in 2020 doubled the number of 2019. In the past, it took doctors more than 30 minutes to do 3D post-processing, interpret a CTA scan and publish a report. However, the application of SenseCare Cardiac has shortened the time to only a few minutes, and the adoption rate of AI results has reached 100%, which not only helped doctors enhance diagnostic efficiency, but also helped the hospital to streamline operations and increase CT scan throughputs.