Pediatric doctors tend to find their calling by following their passion for medicine and then choosing to treat children. But pediatric cardiologist Lynn Peng, MD, came about it from the reverse. When she went to Harvard as an undergrad, she didn’t think she’d go into medicine. She adored kids, so she volunteered at Boston Children’s Hospital in order to spend time with them. “I fell in love with taking care of kids in that setting,” she says. She’d always been good at science and was majoring in chemistry, and it clicked.

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Over a four-year period, patients’ medical records mentioned “Apple Watch” 145 times. Among patients whose medical records mentioned the smartwatch, 41 had abnormal heart rhythms confirmed by traditional diagnostic methods; of these, 29 children had their arrhythmias diagnosed for the first time.

“I was surprised by how often our standard monitoring didn’t pick up arryhthmias and the watch did,” said senior study author Scott Ceresnak, MD, professor of pediatrics. Ceresnak is a pediatric cardiologist who treats patients at Stanford Medicine. “It’s awesome to see that newer technology can really make a difference in how we’re able to care for patients.”

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Pediatric cardiologist Charitha Reddy, MD, teamed up with engineers and computer scientists to develop a model that automatically estimates the left ventricle’s function in children with accuracy and reliability. Medical decisions for children that rely on a doctor’s assessment of the heart’s ability to pump, such as determining safe chemotherapy doses, can benefit from models tailored to children, she said.

Reddy, a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics, helped collect heart ultrasound videos and annotate images from 1,958 pediatric patients seen at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. The model she helped develop analyzed more than 4,000 video clips of hearts and generated estimates of the left ventricle’s function with high accuracy. Its assessments of heart-pumping ability were speedier and more consistent than doctors’, said Reddy, the lead author of a study of the model published in February 2023 in the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography.

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