Emerging Technologies in Medicine ETIM 2025 Congress in Essen on March 24 and 25

At this year's ETIM conference at the University Hospital Essen, Prof. Dr. Dagmar Krefting presented current research results from the University Medical Center Göttingen on the use of Trustworthy AI in sports medicine. The presentation focused on a use case for the age-related analysis of ECG data based on a study recently published in npj Digital Medicine (https://rdcu.be/d55Jw). It was shown how explainable AI (XAI) can be used to visualize age-related changes in the ECG - and thus the “heart age” - and interpret them as markers for individual cardiovascular risk.

The analysis presented shows that there are specific challenges, particularly in competitive sport: In professional soccer players, age was systematically overestimated because physiological adaptations - such as pronounced left ventricular hypertrophy- as is common in the athlete's heart, were falsely assessed by the model as age-related adaptation. These interim results underline the importance of representative training data, transparent models and explainable procedures in order to use AI models for risk assessment fairly and responsibly in medical practice.