With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), an inexpensive test found in many doctors’ offices may soon be used to screen for hidden heart disease.

Structural heart disease, including valve disease, congenital heart disease, and other issues that impair heart function, affects millions of people worldwide. Yet in the absence of a routine, affordable screening test, many structural heart problems go undetected until significant function has been lost.

“We have colonoscopies, we have mammograms, but we have no equivalents for most forms of heart disease,” says Pierre Elias, assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and medical director for artificial intelligence at NewYork-Presbyterian.