Informatics in medicine unlocked
-
Inform Med Unlocked · Jan 2020
AI4COVID-19: AI enabled preliminary diagnosis for COVID-19 from cough samples via an app.
The inability to test at scale has become humanity's Achille's heel in the ongoing war against the COVID-19 pandemic. A scalable screening tool would be a game changer. Building on the prior work on cough-based diagnosis of respiratory diseases, we propose, develop and test an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered screening solution for COVID-19 infection that is deployable via a smartphone app. The app, named AI4COVID-19 records and sends three 3-s cough sounds to an AI engine running in the cloud, and returns a result within 2 min. ⋯ Results show AI4COVID-19 can distinguish among COVID-19 coughs and several types of non-COVID-19 coughs. The accuracy is promising enough to encourage a large-scale collection of labeled cough data to gauge the generalization capability of AI4COVID-19. AI4COVID-19 is not a clinical grade testing tool. Instead, it offers a screening tool deployable anytime, anywhere, by anyone. It can also be a clinical decision assistance tool used to channel clinical-testing and treatment to those who need it the most, thereby saving more lives.