A study, which is part of the COVID-Net open-source initiative launched more than a year ago, involved researchers from Waterloo and spin-off start-up company DarwinAI, as well as radiologists at the Stony Brook School of Medicine and the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.
To maximize the data pool, it is customary to share patient data between clinics by sending copies of databases to the clinics where the algorithm is being trained.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with an estimated 1.8 million deaths in 2020, according to the World Health Organization.
While the AI model was used on a retrospective cohort of patient data collected during the pandemic's first wave, the study demonstrates the ability of AI methods to predict patient outcomes using routine clinical information used by ICU medics.