Coronavirus: New AI tool can help pinpoint most vulnerable patients, says joint Chinese-US development team

This tool can determine risk for acute respiratory distress syndrome, the fluid build-up in the lungs, with up to 80 per cent accuracy

Doctors can use the tool to assess which patients need beds and who can safely go home, as hospital resources are stretched thin in many countries

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Total US coronavirus cases have passed the 164,000 mark amid a new wave of outbreaks and pressure on overwhelmed hospitals like those in New York City, which is bracing for the peak of the pandemic. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:30am, 1 Apr 2020Updated: 9:39am, 1 Apr 2020

A group of Chinese and US researchers have jointly developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool to predict which newly infected coronavirus patients would have a higher risk for severe complications from Covid-19.

Researchers at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, along with their counterparts at the Wenzhou Central Hospital and Cangnan People’s Hospital, worked on a study that designed computer models, which made decisions based on data from the two Chinese hospitals in the eastern coastal city of Wenzhou.

Their study, which was published online on March 30 in the journal Computers, Materials & Continua, focused on an AI tool that could help accurately predict which coronavirus patients would go on to develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) – the fluid build-up in the lungs that can be fatal in the elderly.

“While work remains to further validate our model, it holds promise as another tool to predict the patients most vulnerable to the virus, but only in support of physicians’ hard-won clinical experience in treating viral infections,” said study author Megan Coffee, a clinical assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Disease & Immunology within the Department of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in a statement released on Monday in the US.

The city of Wenzhou, located in China’s eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, had experienced one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks outside the epicentre in Wuhan, capital of the landlocked central province of Hubei. Photo: Xinhua

Their findings come at a time when the worldwide coronavirus death toll soared towards 37,000 amid new waves of outbreaks in the US, where there is increasing pressure on overwhelmed hospitals like those in New York that are bracing for the peak of the pandemic.

It also reflects how the Covid-19 outbreak has led to a surge in the use of AI applications to help contain the spread of the disease. In mainland China, some of the initial applications range from robotic cleaners spraying disinfectant at segregated wards and apps that can track people’s travel history to AI voice assistants calling people to give advice on home quarantine.

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