cardioRisk Project: Clinical Validation Applied To a Portuguese Population

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease is the highest cause of mortality all over the world. Clinical guidelines recommend the use of risk assessment tools in order to aid the clinical decision, being one additional element to optimize the health care plan of a given patient. However, the current risk assessment tools present important weaknesses. The cardioProject intends to improve the cardiovascular risk assessment through the development of innovative methodologies that can defeat the identified problems, namely the performance's improvement, the ability to deal with missing information as well as the capability to incorporate new knowledge (risk factors). This paper is focused on the validation issues of the cardioRisk project. The validation was structured in two different phases: i) preliminary results based on a real patient dataset (460 patients) from Santa Cruz hospital (Lisbon/Portugal); ii) clinical trial involving the ECG acquisition comprising of 100 patients gathered during 2014 in Leiria Hospital Centre (Leiria/Portugal). The obtained results are very interesting, encouraging the further development of the proposed methodologies.