Study Details First Artificial Intelligence Tool to Help Labs Rule-out COVID-19

Hospital-based laboratories and doctors at the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic might soon add artificial intelligence to their testing toolkit. A recent study conducted with collaborators from the University of Vermont and Cedars-Sinai describes the performance of Biocogniv's new AI-COVID™ software. The team found high accuracy in predicting the probability of COVID-19 infection using routine blood tests, which can help hospitals reduce the number of patients referred for scarce PCR testing.

"Nine months into this pandemic, we now have a better understanding of how to care for patients with COVID-19," says lead author and University of Vermont Assistant Professor Timothy Plante, M.D., M.H.S., "but there's still a big bottleneck in COVID-19 diagnosis with PCR testing."

PCR testing is the current standard diagnostic for COVID-19, and requires specific sampling, like a nasal swab, and specialized laboratory equipment to run.

Biocogniv Chief Operating Officer Tanya Kanigan, Ph.D., says, "According to data from over 100 US hospitals, the national average turnaround time for COVID-19 tests ordered in emergency rooms is above 24 hours, far from the targeted one-hour turnaround."

Complete Blood Count and Complete Metabolic Panels are common laboratory tests ordered by emergency departments and have a rapid turnaround time. These tests provide insight into the immune system, electrolytes, kidney, and liver. The researchers were able to train a model that analyzes changes in these routine tests and assigns a probability of the patient being COVID-19 negative with high accuracy.

"AI-COVID takes seconds to generate its informative result once these blood tests return, which can then be incorporated by the laboratory into its own test interpretation," says Jennifer Joe, M.D., an emergency physician in Boston, Mass. and Biocogniv's Chief Medical Officer. "In an efficient emergency department that prioritizes these routine blood tests, the door-to-result time could be under an hour."

Cedars-Sinai pulmonary and internal medicine specialist Victor Tapson, M.D., says such assistive tools that help physicians rule out possible diagnoses are familiar in emergency medicine.

"For example, a low D-dimer blood test can help us rule out clots in certain patients, allowing providers to skip expensive, often time-consuming diagnostics such as chest CT scans," says Tapson.

The Biocogniv team believes a secondary benefit of laboratories incorporating AI-COVID might be reduced time for traditional PCR results.

"With the help of AI-COVID, laboratories might relieve some of the testing bottleneck by helping providers better allocate rapid PCR testing for patients who really need it," says Joe.

The AI-COVID model was validated on real world data from Cedars-Sinai as well as on data from geographically and demographically diverse patient encounters from 22 U.S. hospitals, achieving an area under the curve (or AUC) of 0.91 out of 1.00.

"This enables the model to achieve a high sensitivity of 95% while maintaining moderate specificity of 49%, which is very similar to the performance of other commonly used rule-out tests," says Biocogniv Chief Scientific Officer George Hauser, MD, a pathologist.

Biocogniv CEO Artur Adib, Ph.D., says, "I'm honored to have such an impressive team of medical scientists from the University of Vermont and Cedars-Sinai as collaborators in validating this timely model. AI has progressed considerably; the time is now to leverage this powerful tool for new healthcare breakthroughs, and we're glad to direct it to help hospital laboratories and providers combat the current COVID-19 crisis."

Plante TB, Blau AM, Berg AN, Weinberg AS, Jun IC, Tapson VF, Kanigan TS, Adib AB.
Development and External Validation of a Machine Learning Tool to Rule Out COVID-19 Among Adults in the Emergency Department Using Routine Blood Tests: A Large, Multicenter, Real-World Study.
J Med Internet Res 2020. doi: 10.2196/24048

Most Popular Now

AI also Assesses Dutch Mammograms Better…

AI is detecting tumors more often and earlier in the Dutch breast cancer screening program. Those tumors can then be treated at an earlier stage. This has been demonstrated by...

AI could Help Emergency Rooms Predict Ad…

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help emergency department (ED) teams better anticipate which patients will need hospital admission, hours earlier than is currently possible, according to a multi-hospital study by the...

RSNA AI Challenge Models can Independent…

Algorithms submitted for an AI Challenge hosted by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) have shown excellent performance for detecting breast cancers on mammography images, increasing screening sensitivity while...

Head-to-Head Against AI, Pharmacy Studen…

Students pursuing a Doctor of Pharmacy degree routinely take - and pass - rigorous exams to prove competency in several areas. Can ChatGPT accurately answer the same questions? A new...

NHS Active 10 Walking Tracker Users are …

Users of the NHS Active 10 app, designed to encourage people to become more active, immediately increased their amount of brisk and non-brisk walking upon using the app, according to...

Brain Imaging may Identify Patients Like…

By understanding differences in how people’s brains are wired, clinicians may be able to predict who would benefit from a self-guided anxiety care app, according to a new analysis from...

Unlocking the 10 Year Health Plan

The government's plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive of SPARK TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it...

AI can Find Cancer Pathologists Miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to...

How AI could Speed the Development of RN…

Using artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training...

AI, Full Automation could Expand Artific…

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems such as the UVA Health-developed artificial pancreas could help more type 1 diabetes patients if the devices become fully automated, according to a new review...

MIT Researchers Use Generative AI to Des…

With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Using generative AI algorithms, the research...

AI Hybrid Strategy Improves Mammogram In…

A hybrid reading strategy for screening mammography, developed by Dutch researchers and deployed retrospectively to more than 40,000 exams, reduced radiologist workload by 38% without changing recall or cancer detection...