Doctors can now prioritize patient care employing artificial intelligence (AI)..AI developed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario can determine which COVID-19 patients are at the highest risk of death or organ damage during hospitalization..The brand new computer application can pinpoint vulnerable patients by using patient data from previous COVID-19 patient cases with known clinical outcomes.."There is tremendous potential for predictive AI models like this as they can greatly aid clinicians in identifying who needs help the most, and most urgently, to increase survival rates and reduce rates of serious injury," said Alexander Wong, a professor of Systems Design Engineering at Waterloo..“The new models are part of an open-source project called COVID-Net that has produced several other innovations since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. [They] work by analyzing clinical and biochemical markers such as serum ferritin levels, use of therapeutic heparin, heart rate and blood pressure, and automatically discovering patterns that are predictive of a patient dying or developing kidney injuries,” the university’s website said..Models also explain which indicators they relied on for their predictions — important data points that furnish doctors with the confidence to act on the AI’s conclusions..“AI models that provide not just predictions but the rationale behind the predictions can greatly improve trust and widespread adoption to support clinicians in their decision-making processes along the entire clinical workflow,” said Wong, one of the directors of the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab at Waterloo..Researchers worked as a team on the modelling with Dr. Adrian Florea, an EMR physician at CIUSSS de l'Ouest-de-l'Île-de-Montréal. Together they plan to test them in clinical environment to further improve the program’s accuracy..As with prior research in the COVID-Net project, they have also made their work and results available to researchers and scientists around the world, the website said.."Hospitals are already extremely overburdened by the pandemic, especially with the recent surges due to Omicron and its subvariants and recombinants," said Wong, a Canada Research Chair in AI and Medical Imaging. "Having AI models to help healthcare workers identify who needs care in an efficient and effective manner can significantly reduce the burden, as well as the costs of healthcare.".Researchers predict the models to be applicable to other diseases and conditions. The team is already exploring their use beyond COVID-19 disease..Hossein Aboutalebi and Maya Pavlova, both students in the VIP Lab, contributed to the project along with doctoral student Andrew Hryniowski and Mohammad Javad Shafiee, also a systems design engineering professor at Waterloo..The new AI research paper can be found at https://github.com/h-aboutalebi/CovidBiochem.
