AI spots cardiovascular concerns beyond BACs on mammograms
Artificial intelligence-powered mammograms may offer a way to identify women at increased risk of common cardiovascular diseases without the need for additional imaging.
Breast arterial calcifications (BACs) are the most common finding believed to be associated with cardiovascular diseases on breast imaging, but experts have developed new technology that can look beyond BAC to predict patients’ CVD risk. New research presented during the 2026 European Society of Cardiology Congress suggests that AI also can detect signs of hypertension, ischemic heart disease and stroke.
Researchers trained a deep learning model to identify mammographic features associated with each condition using clinical and imaging data. They then evaluated its ability to distinguish women with and without the diseases. The study included nearly 30,000 women who underwent 97,000 mammograms, with a median age of 54.
According medical histories, hypertension had been diagnosed in 16% of the women, ischemic heart disease in 2.5% and stroke in 2.5%. AI was able to reliably catch signs of these diseases on the patients’ mammograms. The model demonstrated its strongest performance for stroke, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.86. Performance also was promising for hypertension, with an AUROC of 0.79, and ischemic heart disease, with an AUROC of 0.78.
These results remained consistent when researchers accounted for patients' cancer status and age, suggesting the model's performance was not driven solely by those factors. Researchers believe the findings could be promising for the opportunistic diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in women, which is frequently missed or identified after disease has already progressed. Because mammography reaches large numbers of women through routine breast cancer screening, extracting cardiovascular information from the same images could potentially provide an additional opportunity to identify risk without requiring another imaging examination.
“Despite being the leading cause of death in women worldwide, CVD is consistently underdiagnosed and undertreated. A common finding in our medical center, and around the world, is that when women do seek medical help, their CVD is already advanced,” Dr. Viana Copeland from Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Ramat Gan, Israel, noted in her presentation. “On the other hand, many women do attend routine breast cancer screening, even when they haven't sought care for cardiovascular symptoms. We investigated whether AI could help mammography serve an additional purpose in this group—the early detection of CVD—enabling preventive strategies to be implemented.”
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In addition to her background in journalism, Hannah also has patient-facing experience in clinical settings, having spent more than 12 years working as a registered rad tech. She began covering the medical imaging industry for Innovate Healthcare in 2021.