Artificial Intelligence to improve Cardiometabolic Risk Evaluation using CT (ACRE-CT)

Obesity, diabetes and cardiometabolic disease are global health economic burdens.

Depot-specific adipose tissue (AT) inflammation, particularly in visceral AT, is an indicator of cardiometaboilic risk and a potential therapeutic target.

However, visceral AT inflammation is not identifiable by any current blood or imaging biomarkers and does not correlate with simple indicators of obesity.

This major gap in our diagnostic approach gives incomplete or even misleading information, wastes tests and drug treatments, and fails to take full advantage of powerful new drugs, that cannot be optimally targeted.

We discovered new AI imaging biomarkers, derived from routine clinical CT scans, that provide highly quantitative readouts of depot-specific AT inflammation, validated against the pivotal molecular signatures of cardiometabolic risk, from transcriptional analysis of AT biopsies.

Caristo Diagnostics has developed a clinically-applicable technology, FatHealth, that quantifies cardiometabolic risk from routine CT scans, acquired in everyday clinical practice.

We will work with collaborating Universities and NHS Hospitals to develop FatHealth into a carefully tested commercial product.

In the next 18 months we will analyse 20,000 CT scans (from existing NHS imaging resources) to refine the technical aspects of FatHealth across different CT platforms and scan types and validate the ability of FatHealth to stratify cardiometabolic risks using detailed metabolic phenotyping. We will develop an automated, regulatory-approved, web-based portal to deliver FatHealth for use in healthcare systems.

We will work with clinical NHS organisations and patient groups to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of FatHealth in people and patients at risk of diabetes. We have formed collaborations with GPs in Primary Care and with the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs).

FatHealth will fit seamlessly into current clinical pathways to transform cardiometabolic risk assessment, by generating new data from analysis of CT scans that are already widely performed in the NHS and other healthcare systems globally.