The Diagnosis of Cardiovascular Disease Using Simple Blood Biomarkers Through AI and Big Data

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of global mortality, diagnosed primarily through costly imaging modalities which are often overused in asymptomatic patients. Our project aims to develop an AI-based solution for CVD risk stratification using routine blood biomarkers, serving as a pre-imaging test. We used anonymized data from over 500,000 UK Biobank (UKB) patients with CVD assessments. Initially, 701 features including demographics, blood tests, medical conditions, and clinical assessments were selected. The UKB dataset was refined using an automated data curation pipeline to deal with outliers, duplicated fields, and missing values. Then, a hybrid XGBoost classifier was employed, with a scalable loss function, to address overfitting effects during the training process, yielding 0.83 accuracy, 0.82 sensitivity, and 0.84 specificity in diagnosing CVD comorbidities. Key biomarkers identified included blood pressure, BMI, and age. To our knowledge, this is the first case study which utilizes the UKB data towards the identification of cost-effective CVD (non-imaging) risk factors, thus reducing the reliance on imaging modalities.