Diagnostics
CovidDeep is not the only AI-based tool in development. AI-COVID, designed by Biocogniv, could be used as a triage tool in hospitals. It uses physiological data taken from Complete Blood Count and Complete Metabolic Panels – common, cheap lab tests ordered by emergency departments in the US – and assesses markers of infection like blood clotting and inflammation. The tool generates results almost instantly, and can be run on top of the blood tests for minimal added cost.
“We took everyone who’d had a PCR test for Covid... and we told the computer to find patterns. It came out with this tool that was almost too good to believe. The performance is far above and beyond what we’re used to in epidemiology.”
Timothy Plante
NeuTigers reports that its AI-powered CovidDeep screening app is 90% accurate in predicting whether a person is virus positive or negative.
With a very high sensitivity of 95%, along with moderate specificity of 49%, AI-COVID can identify Covid-negative patients with high accuracy, allowing hospitals to allocate PCR tests to the patients most likely to need one. It was tested in collaboration with researchers at the University of Vermont and Cedars- Sinai Medical Centre in California, who are excited by its potential. “We took everyone who’d had a PCR test for Covid, regardless if it was positive or negative, and had also had all these routine blood tests, and we told the
computer to find patterns,” says Dr Timothy Plante, lead study author and assistant professor at the University of Vermont. “It came out with this tool that was almost too good to believe. The performance of this tool is far above and beyond what we’re used to in epidemiology.”
He is excited about the prospects of AI-COVID, not just as a predictive tool for Covid-19, but as an example of the kind of technology that may soon be ubiquitous in medicine. “The complexity that computers can assess is far and beyond the complexity that we can see as humans,” he says. “Computers can assess really subtle patterns that correspond with certain outcomes. So, that’s to say that AI has yet to have its heyday in medicine. It’s in the future, and it’ll help with complex decision making down the road.”
Crisp results
Another technology being hyped for Covid-19 testing is CRISPR, the gene-editing tool. Several companies are developing CRISPR-based tests that can be used to detect viral RNA in a sample.
Dr Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute
of Virology, is developing one such test together with colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. In proof-of-concept studies, it has been able to return results within five minutes using a simple smartphone- based device. While not currently as sensitive as PCR, it is suitable for use at the point of care, and is even able to quantify viral load.
“Part of breaking the pandemic is going to be identifying and isolating people who are infectious very early, so that they cannot spread the virus,” says Ott. “It’s in that rapid-testing role that we see our biggest advantage. That’s also where I think knowing whether your viral load is going up or down could be very important, because you’ll know whether you’re going into an infection or at the tail end of an infection.” Although the device is not yet at the point of commercialisation, Ott hopes it could one day be used in doctors’ surgeries, small businesses, pharmacies, airports and students’ dormitories.
“When it comes to clinical diagnostics, where you want to pick up the last bit of RNA that you can find in a nasal sample, I think PCR will potentially stay the standard,” says Ott. “But when it comes to rapid, inexpensive, deployable testing – and also when you want to quantify the virus – I think CRISPR could replace the PCR. It’s a very good supplement.” Clearly, none of these technologies amounts to a magic bullet for ridding the world of Covid-19. However, over the months ahead we may start to break the stranglehold of PCR and lateral flow tests, with a variety of different triage and testing tools to choose from. Factor in the roll-out of vaccine programmes, and it’s easy to imagine a future in which these technologies play a role in helping us all stay much safer. Time – and the experiments in Austria and elsewhere – will tell.
24 Practical Patient Care /
www.practical-patient-care.com
NeuTigers
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59
