HeartAgent: An Autonomous Agent System for Explainable Differential Diagnosis in Cardiology

TL;DR

HeartAgent is an AI-powered system designed for accurate, explainable, and trustworthy differential diagnosis in cardiology, integrating specialized tools and reasoning to improve diagnostic accuracy and support clinicians.

Contribution

The paper introduces HeartAgent, a novel cardiology-specific agent system that enhances explainability and reasoning in AI-based differential diagnosis.

Findings

Over 36% improvement in top-3 diagnostic accuracy on MIMIC dataset

Clinicians showed 26.9% higher diagnostic accuracy with HeartAgent

Provides transparent reasoning trajectories and supporting references

Abstract

Heart diseases remain a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, necessitating accurate and trustworthy differential diagnosis. However, existing artificial intelligence-based diagnostic methods are often limited by insufficient cardiology knowledge, inadequate support for complex reasoning, and poor interpretability. Here we present HeartAgent, a cardiology-specific agent system designed to support a reliable and explainable differential diagnosis. HeartAgent integrates customized tools and curated data resources and orchestrates multiple specialized sub-agents to perform complex reasoning while generating transparent reasoning trajectories and verifiable supporting references. Evaluated on the MIMIC dataset and a private electronic health records cohort, HeartAgent achieved over 36% and 20% improvements over established comparative methods, in top-3 diagnostic accuracy, respectively. Additionally, clinicians assisted by HeartAgent demonstrated gains of 26.9% in diagnostic accuracy and 22.7% in explanatory quality compared with unaided experts. These results demonstrate that HeartAgent provides reliable, explainable, and clinically actionable decision support for cardiovascular care.