Yale researchers say the artificial intelligence platform they’ve developed using early pandemic hospital data can predict how severe a patient’s disease will be and how long they’ll stay in the hospital. Armed with that information, the researchers expect health care workers could better allocate resources, sending home patients with milder symptoms while focusing on those with more severe ailments. That could help prevent health systems from becoming overwhelmed as many were after the coronavirus arrived. How it works: Researchers built the model using data collected from Yale New Haven Hospital patients hospitalized during a two-month period in 2020 and compared those results to a control group of healthy medical staff working at the hospital at the same time. In addition to collecting data about the patients’ treatment needs — whether they required oxygen or intubation, for example — the researchers identified biomarkers in the patients’ plasma that correlated to disease severity. Even so: The data collection took place before vaccines or many treatments for Covid had been developed. Treatments might make it harder to observe differences in patients’ plasma biomarkers, although larger studies with more participants could overcome that. Since the healthy control patients tended to be white while a high number of hospitalized patients in the study were Black, researchers couldn’t rule out race as a contributing factor. The findings were published in the journal Human Genomics. What's next? The researchers have made their Covid software available online for anyone to use. They’re also hoping to conduct follow-up studies on long Covid. While the platform was trained on Covid data, Vasilis Vasiliou, co-author of the study and epidemiology professor at Yale School of Public Health, told Erin the methodology could be used for other types of outbreaks. For example, researchers could start developing predictive models of what doctors should look for based on initial cases of an influenza outbreak. “Precision public health, that is the whole idea,” Vasiliou said, adding, “The power that these algorithms are giving you is something amazing.”
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