Predicting COVID-19 malignant progression with AI techniques

Background and purposeThe worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) greatly challenges public medical systems. With limited medical resources, the treatment priority is determined by the severity of patients. However, many mild outpatients quickly deteriorate into severe/critical stage. It is crucial to early identify them and give timely treatment for optimizing treatment strategy and reducing mortality. This study aims to establish an AI model to predict mild patients with potential malignant progression. MethodsA total of 133 consecutively mild COVID-19 patients at admission who was hospitalized in Wuhan Pulmonary Hospital from January 3 to February 13, 2020, were selected in this retrospective IRB-approved study. All mild patients were categorized into groups with or without malignant progression. The clinical and laboratory data at admission, the first CT, and the follow-up CT at the severe/critical stage of the two groups were compared. Both multivariate logistic regression and deep learning-based methods were used to build the prediction models, with their area under ROC curves (AUC) compared. ResultsMultivariate logistic regression depicted 6 risk factors for malignant progression: age >55years (OR 5.334, 95%CI 1.8-15.803), comorbid with hypertension (OR 5.093, 95%CI 1.236-20.986), a decrease of albumin (OR 4.01, 95%CI 1.216-13.223), a decrease of lymphocyte (OR 3.459, 95%CI 1.067-11.209), the progressive consolidation from CT1 to CTsevere (OR 1.235, 95%CI 1.018-1.498), and elevated HCRP (OR 1.015, 95%CI 1.002-1.029); and one protective factor: the presence of fibrosis at CT1 (OR 0.656, 95%CI 0.473-0.91). By combining the clinical data and the temporal information of the CT data, our deep learning-based models achieved the best AUC of 0.954, which outperformed logistic regression (AUC: 0.893), ConclusionsOur deep learning-based methods can identify the mild patients who are easy to deteriorate into severe/critical cases efficiently and accurately, which undoubtedly helps to optimize the treatment strategy, reduce mortality, and relieve the medical pressure.