Diary: Pulsating innovation talks at Saudi Heart Association conference

Following the Riyadh Health Cluster event in September, the 35th Annual Conference of the Saudi Heart Association took place over three days in the Saudi capital. The conference covered key themes in cardiology, including cardiac technology and paediatric cardiology.

The event was held at the sprawling Crowne Plaza Riyadh RDC, the largest Crowne Plaza worldwide, sandwiched in between the Ministry of Investment and the offices of the country’s giga-projects.

Among the presentations, there were several discussions on digital health, including topics such as AI in the assessment and management of valvular heart disease, as well as integrating technology and telemedicine into cardiac nursing practice.

On the final day, I attended a presentation by Dr. Samir Latih from Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, who spoke on innovations in in paediatric care and in particular leveraging machine learning.  In his words, “We used pre-operative, inter-operative, and post-operative data to run through machine learning to see if we could predict paediatric cardiac surgery-associated kidney injury. The accuracy was pretty high using our machine learning method.” More on this to come…

To the event organiser, thank you (I particularly appreciated the brownies that were located feet away from the blood thinners).

And finally, to whomever left these “notes” behind, I salute you: