AI4COVID-19: AI Enabled Preliminary Diagnosis for COVID-19 from Cough Samples Via an App

Overview

Journal Inform Med Unlocked

Specialty Medical Informatics

Date 2020 Aug 26

PMID 32839734

Citations 181

Authors

Ali Imran

Iryna Posokhova

Haneya N Qureshi

Usama Masood

Muhammad Sajid Riaz

Kamran Ali

Charles N John

Md Iftikhar Hussain

Muhammad Nabeel

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Background: 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.

Methods: Cough is a symptom of over thirty non-COVID-19 related medical conditions. This makes the diagnosis of a COVID-19 infection by cough alone an extremely challenging multidisciplinary problem. We address this problem by investigating the distinctness of pathomorphological alterations in the respiratory system induced by COVID-19 infection when compared to other respiratory infections. To overcome the COVID-19 cough training data shortage we exploit transfer learning. To reduce the misdiagnosis risk stemming from the complex dimensionality of the problem, we leverage a multi-pronged mediator centered risk-averse AI architecture.

Results: 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.

Citing Articles

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Cough2COVID-19 detection using an enhanced multi layer ensemble deep learning framework and CoughFeatureRanker.

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