Artificial intelligence most likely saved Louie Quiros\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
Mr. Quiros, a 45-year-old caregiver and security guard, showed up at a Queens emergency room in February 2025. For the past four days, he said, he had been coughing up blood and finding it harder and harder to breathe.<\/p>\n
His heart was beating fast, and he wasn\u2019t getting much air to his lungs, but a chest X-ray showed no abnormalities. He also had an electrocardiogram, or ECG, a common test that records the heart\u2019s electrical activity. It was abnormal but showed nothing that would lead to a clear diagnosis. It indicated he might have coronary heart disease \u2014 rare in someone his age. But, as it turned out, that was not his problem.<\/p>\n
The emergency room doctors learned Mr. Quiros had been exposed to wildfire smoke on a recent visit to California and sent him home with asthma medicine and an inhaler.<\/p>\n
Luckily for Mr. Quiros, that emergency room is part of NewYork-Presbyterian\u2019s medical system. Researchers were analyzing all electrocardiograms done on patients in that medical system with an A.I. program, EchoNext<\/a>, to see if it could find patterns in the scans indicating damage to the heart \u2014 patterns a human would not detect.<\/p>\n It\u2019s part of a clinical trial evaluating the A.I. program, which was developed there by Dr. Pierre Elias, medical director of A.I. and cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and his colleagues. Dr. Elias says EchoNext reads an ECG less than 10 minutes after it is performed, and that they analyze nearly 500,000 ECGs a year. Dr. Elias has started a company, Pathway Labs, to market it.<\/p>\n More on Organ Transplants<\/p>\n An Improved System: A crackdown on problems with fairness and safety is achieving results<\/a>, including a big drop in the number of sick patients being passed over for transplants.<\/p>\n Skipped Over in Line: The sickest patients are supposed to get priority for lifesaving transplants. But more and more, they are being skipped<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bungled Organ Retrievals:\u00a0Potential donors endured rushed or premature attempts<\/a>\u00a0to remove their organs. Some were gasping, crying or showing other signs of life.<\/p>\n Courting Overseas Patients:\u00a0Despite an organ shortage, some U.S. hospitals seek out international patients<\/a>, who pay as much as $2 million for a transplant. In recent years, patients from abroad have typically received organs faster than U.S. patients.<\/p>\n Pig Organ Transplants: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to two biotechnology companies for clinical trials that will transplant organs from genetically modified pigs into people with kidney failure<\/a>.<\/p>\n EchoNext found evidence of possible severe heart damage in Mr. Quiros\u2019s electrocardiogram. The team called him back to the hospital one week later for an echocardiogram, a scan that shows the beating heart. What they found was dire. His heart was beating so feebly that just 10 percent of its blood was pumped out with each contraction. At the same time, his mitral valve was leaking blood back into his heart.<\/p>\n When Mr. Quiros\u2019s doctors investigated the cause of his problems using genetic testing, they discovered he had a rare genetic disorder associated with sudden death. To save him, doctors did a heart transplant.<\/p>\n