Qureight, a technology company advancing the understanding of lung and heart disease through the application of its AI-powered imaging and clinical data processing platform, today announced the publication of a peer-reviewed study validating its Vascul8.™ model for pulmonary vascular disorders, at American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology. The study showed that the Vascul8 model provides accurate, automated information on response to surgery for patients treated for chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). These insights allowed the identification of patients at high risk of residual pulmonary hypertension, reducing the need for routine postoperative right heart catheterization.
CTEPH is caused by the presence of chronic blood clots (chronic pulmonary emboli) in the arteries of the lung that do not break down completely. Pulmonary endarterectomy (PEA) surgery is often performed to remove clots. However, patients may have residual pulmonary hypertension (PH) and require further intervention or treatment. The current approach to stratifying patients at risk for pulmonary hypertension involves right heart catheterization (RHC), an invasive and resource-intensive procedure, to measure pressure and blood flow in the pulmonary circulation. The findings reported in this paper show that we can effectively screen patients for residual PH, and therefore perform right heart catheterization only in those at high risk for residual PH, reducing the number of invasive, costly procedures.
Qureight’s AI-powered visualization and clinical data curation platform and deep learning models identify key structural changes in the lung to assess disease progression. In this study, Qureight’s Vascul8 model was used to analyze computed tomography pulmonary angiograms (CTPAs) to quantify changes in blood vessel volume in CTEPH patients after PEA surgery. Analysis with Vascul8 enabled accurate vascular segmentation, including differentiation between arterial and venous blood volume, providing an objective, automated approach to detect changes in vessel volume and predict patients most at risk of residual pulmonary hypertension. This study shows how Qureight’s deep learning technology offers a more personalized, accurate and non-invasive approach to CTEPH treatment management, providing doctors with deeper insights into the severity of a patient’s disease and the need for further intervention.
Joanna Pepke-Zaba, Consultant Physician, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the paper, said: “CTEPH has long had a complex disease management pathway, requiring the subjective expertise of multidisciplinary teams. We are excited to have worked on this study where we show an alternative approach to CTEPH imaging and patient management using Qureight’s imaging analysis model, Vascul8. This marks an important step forward in the development of respiratory diseases in severe and complex diseases.”
Hakim Ghani, Research Fellow, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and first author of the paper, added: “Powered by Vascul8, automated quantification of lung blood volumes from CT scans can help identify patients with chronic blood clots who are still at risk of residual pulmonary hypertension after surgery. This AI-based imaging approach could guide better treatment decisions, support more personalized care, reduce the need for invasive testing and enable new potential clinical advantages.
This study shows the promise of our vascular biomarkers for deep learning and demonstrates that our imaging platform can be used beyond fibrotic lung disease, to pulmonary vascular disorders such as CTEPH. This discovery lays the foundation for future biopharmaceutical collaborations in pulmonary vascular disease, strengthening our leadership in regulatory agnostic disease imaging biomarkers designed for clinical and translational research, to accelerate drug development, enable smarter patient selection and support precision medicine.”
Simon Walsh, CSO and study co-author, Qureight
