Coronary artery calcium (CAC) is a powerful tool to refine atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk assessment. Despite its growing interest, contemporary public attitudes around CAC are not well-described in literature and have important implications for shared decision-making around cardiovascular prevention. We used an artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline consisting of a semi-supervised natural language processing model and unsupervised machine learning techniques to analyze 5,606 CAC-related discussions on Reddit. A total of 91 discussion topics were identified and were classified into 14 overarching thematic groups. These included the strong impact of CAC on therapeutic decision-making, ongoing non-evidence-based use of CAC testing, and the patient perceived downsides of CAC testing (e.g., radiation risk). Sentiment analysis also revealed that most discussions had a neutral (49.5%) or negative (48.4%) sentiment. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of an AI-based approach to analyze large, publicly available social media data to generate insights into public perceptions about CAC, which may help guide strategies to improve shared decision-making around ASCVD management and public health interventions.

冠状动脉钙 (CAC) 是完善动脉粥样硬化性心血管疾病 (ASCVD) 风险评估的强大工具。尽管人们对 CAC 的兴趣日益浓厚，但当代公众对 CAC 的态度并没有在文献中得到很好的描述，并且对围绕心血管预防的共同决策具有重要影响。我们使用由半监督自然语言处理模型和无监督机器学习技术组成的人工智能 (AI) 管道来分析 Reddit 上的 5,606 个与 CAC 相关的讨论。总共确定了 91 个讨论主题，并分为 14 个总体主题组。其中包括 CAC 对治疗决策的强烈影响、CAC 测试的持续非循证使用以及患者感知到的 CAC 测试的缺点（例如辐射风险）。情绪分析还显示，大多数讨论的情绪是中性（49.5%）或负面（48.4%）。这项研究的结果表明，基于人工智能的方法可以分析大量公开的社交媒体数据，从而深入了解公众对 CAC 的看法，这可能有助于指导改善 ASCVD 管理和公共卫生干预措施的共同决策的策略。