New AI tool to help doctors assess severity of COVID in patients

Toronto: Artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo is capable of assessing the severity of COVID-19 cases with a promising degree of accuracy.

The researchers from the University of Waterloo and Alexander Wong, a systems design engineering professor and co-founder of software company DarwinAI believes that the newly developed technology could give doctors an important tool to help them manage cases.

Wong said that in order to determine the best course of action for treatment and care, assessing the severity of a patient with Covid-19 is a critical step in the clinical workflow. This includes making decisions like admitting the patient to ICU, giving a patient oxygen therapy, or putting a patient on a mechanical ventilator.

Deep-learning AI was trained to analyse the extent and opacity of infection in the lungs of Covid-19 patients based on chest x-rays for the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The scores were then compared to assessments of the same x-rays by expert radiologists, the team said.

For both extent and opacity, important indicators of the severity of infections, predictions made by the AI software were in good alignment with scores provided by the human experts.

Wong added that the promising results in this study show that AI has a strong potential to be an effective tool for supporting frontline healthcare workers in their decisions and improving clinical efficiency.