AI software to detect heart plaque developed by Grade 11 students

Grade 11 students from Quezon City developed an artificial intelligence-powered software that can easily and more accurately detect plaque buildup in the heart from an image of a CT scan.

According to the Game Changer segment of "24 Oras” on Monday, students of Quezon City Science High School developed the "Preemptive Identification Of Neointimal Tissue In Imaging For Gleaning Atherosclerotic Plaques" or Pintig.

Eating fatty food may cause plaque buildup or clogging in the arteries of the heart.

“Ang problema po (The problem) with our current landscape, it can only be detected during its advanced stage and ang mahirap pa po (it’s difficult) to actually mitigate it. You have to go through a series of invasive surgeries that may not just actually damage the structure of the patient and pose expensive cost,” developer Kenzo Miguel Tayko said.

The Pintig can be an assistive tool for medical professionals as it can highlight, detect, and classify the atherosclerosis plaque or cloggings of a patient’s heart.

“Pintig actually translates or examines each of the pixels of the images as small as 50 micrometers something that is not visible to the naked eye,” Tayko said.

The students work on programming and machine learning of the software, which has up to 98% accuracy.

“14,000 data sets of CT SCAN images so it comes from about 200 patients,” Tayko said.

A person must be a registered patient to use Pintig. The heart image from the CT scan can be uploaded to the Run Image Analysis, and within seconds it can diagnose whether a heart is negative or positive from a CAD plaque.

The results will come out in the software's patient's results.

The Grade 11 students won the first Robotics Intelligent Machines in the previous regional science and technology fair.

The software will also undergo clinical trials with the help of the Philippine Heart Center. —Mariel Celine Serquiña/LDF, GMA Integrated News