Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Remote Monitoring After Cardiac Surgery: A Prospective Single-Centre Feasibility Study with Retrospective Wound Image Classification

Background/Objectives: Unplanned readmission within 30 days affects 12–20% of patients after cardiac surgery, largely through complications developing at home. We evaluated the feasibility, acceptability, and adherence of a 30-day post-discharge remote monitoring programme. In a separate retrospective analysis that did not inform patient care, we also assessed how accurately an investigational AI-based classifier triages the programme’s wound photographs.

Methods

In this prospective single-centre study, 76 of 85 screened patients were monitored for 30 days with twice-daily blood pressure and pulse, daily weight, electrocardiography (ECG), and alternate-day wound photographs, all reviewed daily by a study clinician. Retrospectively, 735 photographs of 88 wounds from 71 patients, labelled by two blinded clinicians, were used to train an ensemble of five convolutional neural networks, tested on a patient-disjoint test set of 147 images from 15 patients.