Artificial intelligence-enhanced electrocardiography for the prediction of future type 2 diabetes mellitus: a model-development and multicentre validation study.

Authors

Libor Pastika, Konstantinos Patlatzoglou, Ewa Sieliwonczyk, Joseph Barker, Boroumand Zeidaabadi, Kathryn A McGurk, Sandhi M Barreto, Lidyane Camelo, Sadia Khan, William R Scott, Declan P O'Regan, Bruce B Duncan, Maria I Schmidt, James S Ware, Shivani Misra, Daniel B Kramer, Jonathan W Waks, Nicholas S Peters, Antonio Luiz Pinho Ribeiro, Arunashis Sau, Fu Siong Ng

Published in

European heart journal. Digital health. Volume 7. Issue 7. Pages ztag118. Epub Jul 22, 2026.

Abstract

A significant proportion of type 2 diabetes cases remain undiagnosed despite screening advances, carrying substantial cardiometabolic risk. Artificial intelligence-enhanced electrocardiography (AI-ECG) detects subtle ECG changes in subclinical disease, potentially enabling opportunistic screening.
We developed AI-ECG Risk Estimator for Diabetes Mellitus (AIRE-DM), a convolutional neural network with discrete-time survival loss, for diagnosis of prevalent and prediction of incident type 2 diabetes. It was trained on 1 163 401 ECGs from 189 537 individuals from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and externally validated in UK Biobank (UKB; n = 65 606) and ELSA-Brasil (n = 13 739). AI-ECG Risk Estimator for Diabetes Mellitus demonstrated moderate discrimination for prevalent type 2 diabetes (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve: BIDMC 0.724, UKB 0.733, ELSA-Brasil 0.706) and incident type 2 diabetes (C-index: BIDMC 0.667, UKB 0.688, ELSA-Brasil 0.625). The highest AIRE-DM risk quartile had elevated incident diabetes risk vs. the lowest (hazard ratio: BIDMC 4.75, UKB 7.52, ELSA-Brasil 3.96). AI-ECG Risk Estimator for Diabetes Mellitus was non-inferior to the American Diabetes Association Diabetes Risk Test in BIDMC, with improved predictive accuracy when combined. In normoglycaemic patients, AIRE-DM was superior to glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) for predicting incident diabetes in BIDMC and non-inferior in ELSA-Brasil. The highest risk quartile reached 5% cumulative type 2 diabetes mellitus incidence 5.4 years (BIDMC) and 4.8 years (ELSA-Brasil) earlier than the lowest risk quartile, after adjusting for HbA1c, age, and sex. Phenome- and genome-wide association studies revealed biologically plausible associations with glucose regulation, cardiac morphology, diastolic dysfunction, arterial stiffness, and lipid metabolism.
AI-ECG Risk Estimator for Diabetes Mellitus detects prevalent type 2 diabetes and predicts incident disease, uniquely identifying high-risk individuals within the normoglycaemic range. Combined with clinical scores or biomarkers, it enhances risk stratification, enabling earlier intervention.

PMID:
42668860
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 30 Aug 2026.

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