Catharina Hospital

The largest hospital in the Netherlands’ Eindhoven region will implement AI to increase accuracy and help speed diagnosis of heart disease.

Every year, approximately 40,000 patients are diagnosed with heart failure in the Netherlands.^[1] One of the most troubling issues confronting cardiologists is that heart disease often develops without any noticeable symptoms. Catharina Hospital, the largest hospital in the Netherlands’ Eindhoven region, plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve this challenge.

In July 2022, Catharina Hospital announced that they chose products from the HPE Ezmeral software portfolio to build a cloud-native analytics and data lakehouse, enabling the hospital to provide earlier detection and more accurate diagnosis of heart disease. Using HPE Ezmeral ML Ops and HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics, the hospital will create a central data lakehouse to securely collect anonymized patient data from various sources inside and outside the hospital. That data will be leveraged to gain new insights to help improve patient care. The data will also be used to accelerate AI model training for the study of heart disease, allowing cardiologists to significantly improve the treatment and management of heart disease and provide better health outcomes for their patients.

Dr. Thomas P. Mast, from the Cardiology Department at Catharina Hospital, said, “The new data lakehouse that we’ve created using HPE Ezmeral will enable us to help accelerate model training and detect cardiogram anomalies among the 500,000 electrocardiograms (ECGs) already available for data analysis with higher precision and to identify the correct diagnosis and treatment. The development of these algorithms based on artificial intelligence may deliver more accurate diagnoses and move toward a more preventative approach to patient care. This may also relieve some of the pressures on our healthcare system and ensures patient data remains in the hospital and is not moved to the public cloud.”

The HPE Ezmeral open-source architecture also allows the hospital greater choice when selecting software because it integrates easily with the HPE Ezmeral platform through open-source Kubernetes and the growing number of validated ISV partners in the HPE GreenLake Marketplace, resulting in faster time-to-value.

“HPE has been working with the hospital for a number of years to deliver technology solutions, and we are pleased with the smooth implementation of HPE Ezmeral to unite its disparate data sources into a single data lakehouse,” said Clemens Esser, Chief Technologist at HPE. “With this single, standardized data platform, the AI and data science teams within the hospital will be able to truly harness the value of their data and have a direct impact on improving patient care. The partnership is a common use case scenario for medical institutions across the world and illustrates the strength of data innovations in the medical field.”

Catharina Hospital joins a growing number of businesses and enterprises across multiple industries turning to the HPE Ezmeral portfolio of products for their analytics initiatives. The HPE Ezmeral software portfolio is a hybrid analytics and data science platform designed to drive data-first modernizations, enabling enterprises to unlock the value of their data wherever it lives. HPE Ezmeral helps customers innovate faster with choice, efficiency, and flexibility not available from niche and cloud-based solutions.

The HPE Ezmeral portfolio includes four products. The HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise is a secure, enterprise-grade platform used to build and deploy applications at scale across data centers, multiple clouds, and at the edge for a wide range of AI and analytics workloads. HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric is a single data management platform that spans edge to cloud and provides direct access to data regardless of location. HPE Ezmeral ML Ops operationalizes end-to-end processes across the ML lifecycle, speeds up data model timelines, and reduces time to market. HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics is a platform that modernizes legacy data and applications with hybrid analytics and machine learning. The entire HPE Ezmeral portfolio is available to customers globally, providing frictionless access to data edge to cloud.

¹Heart disease in the Netherlands, National Library of Medicine, 2013, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3890010/