The AI That Spots a Stopped Heart

A woman in Copenhagen hears a loud crash in the next room and rushes in to discover her father sprawled on the floor, unresponsive. She quickly calls Denmark’s health-emergency hotline, where a person answers the phone—but a computer is eavesdropping. As the operator runs through a series of questions—the patient’s age, physical condition, what he was doing when he fell—the computer quickly determines the man’s heart has stopped and issues an alert. “Those human dispatchers have an amazingly hard job,” says Andreas Cleve Lohmann, co-founder of Corti SA, a Danish artificial intelligence software house that created the program. “This software can help them save lives.”

Corti’s AI employs machine learning to analyze the words a caller uses to describe an incident, the tone of voice, and background noises on the line. The software correctly detected cardiac arrests in 93 percent of cases, vs. 73 percent for human dispatchers, according to a study by the University of Copenhagen, the Danish National Institute of Public Health, and the Copenhagen EMS. What’s more, the software made its determination in an average of 48 seconds, more than a half-minute faster than the humans did. False positives—mistakenly concluding that a person’s heart has stopped—were the same for both, 2 percent.