Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number one of death globally: more people die annually from
CVDs than from any other cause.
Most CVDs can be prevented by addressing behavioural risk factors such as tobacco use, unhealthy
diet and obesity, physical inactivity and harmful use of alcohol using population-wide strategies.
People with CVD or who are at high cardiovascular risk (due to the presence of one or more risk
factors such as hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidaemia or already established disease) need early
detection and management using counselling and medicines, as appropriate.
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Professor John Price is a heart surgeon. He published a number of research paper in the area of
CVDs.
Dr Ben Williams as a physicist and a mathematician whose research interests are bio-medical
statistics and mathematical models.
John and Ben worked together on a Machine Learning project related to processing of ECG test data
for detecting heart diseases. They performed hundreds of electrocardiogram (ECG) tests on patients
with CVDs. Analysing ECG tests they came up with a conclusion that some heart diseases with a high
probability can be diagnosed using Machine Learning algorithms.