Hacker News Reader

Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

Article seems very light on details. Is this trying to detect ECG markers of heart attacks (like ST segment issues)? Is it somehow detecting troponin in the blood stream? How? And how are they going to prevent false positives if this is indeed a wrist-based device as I imagine it will be?

View on HN

It seems to be using ECG, the (correct) springer link is https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-82377-0_...

Can't read the full article. Abstract mentions 92% accuracy. That could be abysmal depending on how it's calculated? Correctly identifying 92% of heart attacks and missing 8% might be pretty good. But reporting false positives 8% of the time would be awful.

Even 'return false' would best 92% accuracy.

Yes, global afib prevalence is about 1-2%, so return false would be 98-99% accurate, which is why accuracy is not a metric used to assess medical diagnostics.

However, the sensitivity of return false is 0%, which renders it useless (and why sensitivity and specificity are used in this context).

I suspect it's probably worse than that in reality. From a quick search on state of the art ECG results (the full system of leads attached all over your torso) it looks like around 90 percent specificity (True negative rate) and under 50 percent sensitivity (true positive rate). So it's only pretty good at ruling out heart attacks, but still misses them sometimes. But is pretty bad when it comes to false alarms. I think they use it along with multiple other tests and consideration of symptoms in triage at the hospital.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com