Hong Kong University's medical school said it has developed the city's first AI-driven tool to predict cardiovascular diseases.

Called P-CARDIAC - short for personalised cardiovascular disease risk assessment for Chinese - the tool can find out within seconds whether a particular individual may suffer heart disease over the next decade.

According to the Centre for Health Protection, heart diseases were the third most common cause of death last year, behind cancer and pneumonia.

The prediction model utilises health records obtained from the Hospital Authority.

Assistant professor Celine Chui said similar prediction models overseas may not be applicable to the local population.

"In the western population, every jurisdiction, their healthcare system is different. The access to healthcare is also different," she said.

"The main point why this model would specifically be very suitable to be applied in Hong Kong is because we use the Hong Kong data, we use local data, it reflects in reality what's actually happening in Hong Kong."

Chui hoped the assessment tool could help with risk stratification of patients, and alleviate the manpower shortage in public healthcare.

A two-year study will kick off within this year to ascertain the effectiveness of P-CARDIAC.

It hopes to recruit 3,000 patients with cardiovascular issues from six public hospitals.