Life (Nov 2021)

COVID-19 and Artificial Intelligence: An Approach to Forecast the Severity of Diagnosis

  • Anca Loredana Udriștoiu,
  • Alice Elena Ghenea,
  • Ștefan Udriștoiu,
  • Manuela Neaga,
  • Ovidiu Mircea Zlatian,
  • Corina Maria Vasile,
  • Mihaela Popescu,
  • Eugen Nicolae Țieranu,
  • Alex-Ioan Salan,
  • Adina Andreea Turcu,
  • Dragos Nicolosu,
  • Daniela Calina,
  • Ramona Cioboata

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/life11111281
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 11
p. 1281

Abstract

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(1) Background: The new SARS-COV-2 pandemic overwhelmed intensive care units, clinicians, and radiologists, so the development of methods to forecast the diagnosis’ severity became a necessity and a helpful tool. (2) Methods: In this paper, we proposed an artificial intelligence-based multimodal approach to forecast the future diagnosis’ severity of patients with laboratory-confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection. At hospital admission, we collected 46 clinical and biological variables with chest X-ray scans from 475 COVID-19 positively tested patients. An ensemble of machine learning algorithms (AI-Score) was developed to predict the future severity score as mild, moderate, and severe for COVID-19-infected patients. Additionally, a deep learning module (CXR-Score) was developed to automatically classify the chest X-ray images and integrate them into AI-Score. (3) Results: The AI-Score predicted the COVID-19 diagnosis’ severity on the testing/control dataset (95 patients) with an average accuracy of 98.59%, average specificity of 98.97%, and average sensitivity of 97.93%. The CXR-Score module graded the severity of chest X-ray images with an average accuracy of 99.08% on the testing/control dataset (95 chest X-ray images). (4) Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that the deep learning methods based on the integration of clinical and biological data with chest X-ray images accurately predicted the COVID-19 severity score of positive-tested patients.

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