Support for data-based heart research to continue

Businessman Anders Wiklöf from the Åland Islands has made a further generous donation to cardiovascular disease research at Uppsala University. The contribution is for continued targeted support for heart research at the University, based on data from large-scale health data sources and artificial intelligence.

Sweden is a country with quite unique conditions for medical ‘big data’ research. This is thanks to the information collected in our world-leading medical registers, which cover the entire population, digitised healthcare data systems, and a long tradition of large population studies following voluntary participants over a period of decades.

The research at the Anders Wiklöf Institute for Heart Research is led by Johan Sundström, cardiologist and professor of epidemiology. Over the past decade he has led a national initiative to coordinate all of Sweden’s population studies, with the goal of enabling world-leading cardiovascular research. To be usable, the enormous quantities of data to which the researchers have access require extensive processing by experts in various disciplines. New analytical methods are also required, including artificial intelligence (AI).

“Sweden’s solidarity-based model of healthcare and national health registers offer unique opportunities, and to make the most of these opportunities, new methods are needed along with the abundant but unstructured patient record data,” Sundström says. “We see potential above all in artificial intelligence and machine learning, a technology in which computers learn to solve tasks without being explicitly programmed for it. With the right approach, we can move the front line of our entire field forward.”

AI methods for ECG interpretation

The support from Anders Wiklöf has enabled the institute to recruit two data scientists to continue the development of AI. Researchers at the institute have also succeeded in developing AI methods for ECG interpretation and for finding myocardial infarctions.

“With health and medical care under severe pressure, new methods are needed to make correct diagnoses in time and to choose the best treatment. Thanks to the generous and long-term support from Anders Wiklöf, heart researchers and mathematicians can join up to usher the future in at our Swedish hospitals through artificial intelligence and register-based studies. The donation is therefore strategically important to accelerate our research for the good of human health, both here in Scandinavia and globally,” comments Anders Hagfeldt, Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University.

Annica Hulth