John OsborneChief Medical Officer, ClearCardio LLC · Preventive cardiologist and Chief Medical Officer at ClearCardio

How to See Blocked Arteries Before a Heart Attack!

2 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the presenter explains that before the advent of cardiac CT combined with artificial intelligence, clinicians could not reliably answer whether a patient’s arterial plaque had improved after interventions such as heart attacks, stents, balloon angioplasty, or surgery. Traditional follow‑up relied on indirect measures like blood pressure, cholesterol, or weight loss, which do not reveal the actual state of plaque. The new approach uses cardiac CT imaging enhanced by AI algorithms to quantify the amount, composition, and category of plaque, making it possible for doctors and patients to directly assess whether plaque burden has decreased or changed in character after treatment or lifestyle modifications.

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If you had a heart attack or stents or balloons or surgery and you had your heart therapy and you do whatever your doctor tells you to do, down the road if you said, well, gee, doc, you know, I'm doing all the things you asked me to do, I'm taking medications, I lost weight, I'm not smoking, or whatever might be relevant to the individual patient, and say, well, that's great, but, uh, and I'm taking your medications, my numbers are better, my blood pressure is better, my cholesterol is better, whatever. But if you were to ask your doctor, is my plaque better? Up until we had cardiac CT and AI, that was not an answerable question. Question, because we had no way of understanding where you came from, how much plaque you had, what kind of plaque, what category of plaque you have— all of the stuff that we can derive from AI now added on to your cardiac CT.