Multimodal explainable artificial intelligence identifies patients with non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy at risk of lethal ventricular arrhythmias

Abstract The efficacy of an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) in patients with a non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy for primary prevention of sudden cardiac death is increasingly debated. We developed a multimodal deep learning model for arrhythmic risk prediction that integrated late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electrocardiography (ECG) and clinical data. Short-axis LGE-MRI scans and 12-lead ECGs were retrospectively collected from a cohort of 289 patients prior to ICD implantation, across two tertiary hospitals. A residual variational autoencoder was developed to extract physiological features from LGE-MRI and ECG, and used as inputs for a machine learning model (DEEP RISK) to predict malignant ventricular arrhythmia onset. In the validation cohort, the multimodal DEEP RISK model predicted malignant ventricular arrhythmias with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.84 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.71–0.96), a sensitivity of 0.98 (95% CI 0.75–1.00) and a specificity of 0.73 (95% CI 0.58–0.97). The models trained on individual modalities exhibited lower AUROC values compared to DEEP RISK [MRI branch: 0.80 (95% CI 0.65–0.94), ECG branch: 0.54 (95% CI 0.26–0.82), Clinical branch: 0.64 (95% CI 0.39–0.87)]. These results suggest that a multimodal model achieves high prognostic accuracy in predicting ventricular arrhythmias in a cohort of patients with non-ischaemic systolic heart failure, using data collected prior to ICD implantation.