Naples Comprehensive Health’s Rooney Heart Institute has become the first hospital in the United States to deploy two artificial intelligence-powered platforms that can predict heart attacks up to 10 years before symptoms appear. The Collier County health care system announced in November 2025 its collaboration with Stamford, Connecticut-based Caristo Diagnostics to implement CaRi-Plaque and CaRi-Heart technologies. NCH is the largest health care system in Collier County and represents a major advance in using AI to prevent heart disease rather than treating heart attacks after they occur.
“In the new era of medicine, we’re trying to pivot from treatment to prevention,” said Dr. Robert Cubeddu, president of Rooney Heart Institute. “There are a lot of patients with inherent cardiovascular risk factors who are not aware of their risk of suffering from a heart attack or a stroke.” The innovative AI solutions enhance doctors’ ability to predict patients’ risk of cardiovascular disease by detecting subtleties that traditional methods miss. Current clinical pathways often fail to identify high-risk patients by missing inflammatory disease activity and relying on plaque assessment alone.
“These AI-powered tools enable us to really look into the heart and assess the risk of a cardiovascular event by detecting subtleties in inflammation at a tissue level in the coronary arteries,” Cubeddu said. “And if we’re able to identify that in advance and we’re able to implement risk-modification treatment and strategies, then we will be able to prevent a cardiovascular event in the future for these patients.” The technology represents a shift from responding to cardiac events after they happen to preventing them altogether through early detection and intervention.
“This NCH-Caristo collaboration represents a new paradigm in cardiovascular medicine,” said Dr. Dee Dee Wang, section head of cardiac imaging at NCH Rooney Heart Institute. “Doctors are used to responding to cardiac events after they happen. Caristo has the first clinically validated AI solutions that let us prevent heart attacks a decade before they occur.” Wang describes the technology as “AI with depth” since it is based on decades of data from the University of Oxford, where researchers identified which patients would be at higher risk for heart attacks and open-heart surgery.
The two AI platforms work in complementary ways to provide comprehensive cardiac risk assessment. CaRi-Plaque technology identifies cholesterol buildup in blood vessels, while CaRi-Heart detects inflammation around the vessel. “What we’re learning about inflammation is it’s not good enough to just not have any plaque in your blood vessels,” Wang explained. “It’s important to not have any inflammation, and that in itself is an independent risk factor that can be used to tailor medication regimens specifically for a person instead of treating as a population-based sample.”
The breakthrough addresses a critical gap in current cardiac care where cardiologists previously assumed patients were at low risk of heart attack if CT scans showed no cholesterol buildup or blockages. The AI-powered imaging technologies, already used in Europe, can identify inflammatory disease activity that traditional assessments miss. This allows doctors to implement personalized treatment strategies based on individual risk factors rather than population-based approaches.
NCH will participate in an international registry of clinical trials to help understand how the technology benefits patients in the United States. “We’re hoping to also contribute more information so we can better understand how to implement this technology for everyday patients,” Wang said. The collaboration positions NCH at the forefront of preventive cardiology as health care systems across Southwest Florida unveil new technologies to raise the quality of regional health care and retain patients locally as the population grows.