Cited by 156Artificial Intelligence in HealthcareNon-Invasive Vital Sign MonitoringMachine Learning in Healthcare

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 3 of the 16 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

DeepHeart: Semi-Supervised Sequence Learning for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction

Open access
Ballinger, Brandon, Hsieh, Johnson, Singh, Avesh, Sohoni, Nimit, Wang, Jack, Tison, Geoffrey, Marcus, Gregory, Sanchez, Jose, Maguire, Carol, Olgin, Jeffrey, Pletcher, Mark·2018·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We train and validate a semi-supervised, multi-task LSTM on 57,675 person-weeks of data from off-the-shelf wearable heart rate sensors, showing high accuracy at detecting multiple medical conditions, including diabetes (0.8451), high cholesterol (0.7441), high blood pressure (0.8086), and sleep apnea (0.8298). We compare two semi-supervised training methods, semi-supervised sequence learning and heuristic pretraining, and show they outperform hand-engineered biomarkers from the medical literature. We believe our work suggests a new approach to patient risk stratification based on cardiovascular risk scores derived from popular wearables such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, or Android Wear.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

DeepHeart trains a semi-supervised, multi-task LSTM on wearable heart-rate and step-count data from 14,011 participants, detecting diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea with c-statistics up to 0.8451. Semi-supervised sequence learning and heuristic pretraining outperform hand-engineered biomarker baselines, though the paper notes confounding, deployment, interpretability, and data-scale challenges.

Key findings

  • On 57,675 person-weeks, semi-supervised sequence pretraining achieved c-statistics of 0.7441 for high cholesterol, 0.8086 for high blood pressure, and 0.8298 for sleep apnea; the abstract reports diabetes at 0.8451, while Table 2 lists 0.8451 for the no-pretraining LSTM and 0.7998 for unsupervised pretraining.
  • The LSTM without pretraining outperformed baselines on sleep apnea (0.80 vs 0.55–0.66), hypertension (0.80 vs 0.61–0.72), high cholesterol (0.67 vs 0.43–0.60), and diabetes (0.85 vs 0.41–0.79).
  • Heuristic pretraining improved high cholesterol (0.71 vs 0.67) but significantly hurt high blood pressure (0.74 vs 0.80); semi-supervised sequence learning improved high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea.
  • For hypertension and sleep apnea, unsupervised pretraining yielded a 10x improvement in data-efficiency: nearly the same accuracy with 10% of labeled data as with 100% and no pretraining.

Methods

  • Recruited 14,011 Apple Watch app users in partnership with the UCSF Health eHeart Study, collecting 200 million unlabeled sensor measurements; after filtering, 57,675 person-weeks were split into 33,628 training, 18,555 tuning, and 12,790 validation weeks, with disjoint participants across sets.
  • Model inputs were multi-channel, multi-timescale tensors for heart rate, step count, and time deltas; architecture used 3 temporal convolution layers followed by 4 bidirectional LSTM layers, with multi-task outputs for high cholesterol, hypertension, sleep apnea, diabetes, and ECG.
  • Compared supervised LSTM, heuristic pretraining on heart-rate-variability metrics at 5-second, 30-second, 5-minute, and 30-minute windows, and semi-supervised sequence autoencoder pretraining; baselines used 13 hand-engineered biomarkers and standard ML algorithms, evaluated by c-statistic/AUC on the test set.

Limitations

  • The paper states challenges including confounding (e.g., beta blockers affecting heart rate variability), deployment barriers, lack of interpretability in deep learning, and difficulty modeling long time-scale and high-volume data.
  • The paper notes high cholesterol has the least direct physiological relationship with heart rate variability and may reflect confounders such as age, sex, or medications; diabetes has scarce labels (1,678 person-weeks).
  • Evident from the text: consumer sensors have significant error and variable measurement rates, ambulatory activities like walking, exercise, stress, alcohol, or coffee may confuse simple heuristics, and the results are predictive rather than causal.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11891

Cites

40 of 40 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

3 of 16 cited sources checked · 2 supported · 0 flagged · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 30 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 10
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 12
18 of 18
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    No such database exists for wearable data.

    “No such database exists for wearable data, and in most hospital systems, recruiting even a hundred patients into a new medical study is labor-intensive and expensive.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Recruiting even a hundred patients into a new medical study is labor-intensive and expensive.

    “No such database exists for wearable data, and in most hospital systems, recruiting even a hundred patients into a new medical study is labor-intensive and expensive.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    High cholesterol has the least direct physiological relationship with heart rate variability in the medical literature.

    “Among all four health conditions, high cholesterol has the least direct physiological relationship with heart rate variability in the medical literature.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Purely supervised deep learning requires many labeled examples.

    “However, purely supervised deep learning requires many labeled examples.”
4 of 4

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • Data-set split counts exceed the stated total

    Major

    The reported training, tuning, and validation counts sum to 64,973 person-weeks, not the stated total of 57,675.

    Reported 57675 · recomputed 64973

  • Conflicting results for heart-rate-only prediction of high blood pressure

    Minor

    The same passage says the heart-rate-only model performed significantly worse on high blood pressure and also performed the same within the 95% confidence interval.

2 of 2

Citations

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Items 101–146 of 146

Metadata

Authors
Ballinger, B., Hsieh, J., Singh, A., Sohoni, N., Wang, J., Tison, G., Marcus, G., Sanchez, J., Maguire, C., Olgin, J., & Pletcher, M.
Affiliations
  • Stanford Medicine (US)
  • University of California, San Francisco (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Published
2018-04-26
Volume
32
Issue
1
Pages
2079-2086
ISSN
  • 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
  • 2374-3468
OpenAlex
W2785925437
Cited by
156
References
40
Citations by year
2026: 10 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 18 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 23 · 2018: 8
FWCI
20.75
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
  • AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
Keywords
cardiovascular risk prediction, semi-supervised learning, sequence learning, LSTM, wearable heart rate sensors, diabetes detection, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, sleep apnea, multi-task learning, risk stratification, pre-training

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