Covid-19 rapid test by combining a Random Forest-based web system and blood tests.

The disease caused by the new type of coronavirus, Covid-19, has posed major public health challenges for many countries. With its rapid spread, since the beginning of the outbreak in December 2019, the disease transmitted by SARS-CoV-2 has already caused over 2 million deaths to date. In this work, we propose a web solution, called Heg.IA, to optimize the diagnosis of Covid-19 through the use of artificial intelligence. Our system aims to support decision-making regarding to diagnosis of Covid-19 and to the indication of hospitalization on regular ward, semi-ICU or ICU based on decision a Random Forest architecture with 90 trees. The main idea is that healthcare professionals can insert 41 hematological parameters from common blood tests and arterial gasometry into the system. Then, Heg.IA will provide a diagnostic report. The system reached good results for both Covid-19 diagnosis and to recommend hospitalization. For the first scenario we found average results of accuracy of 92.891%±0.851, kappa index of 0.858 ± 0.017, sensitivity of 0.936 ± 0.011, precision of 0.923 ± 0.011, specificity of 0.921 ± 0.012 and area under ROC of 0.984 ± 0.003. As for the indication of hospitalization, we achieved excellent performance of accuracies above 99% and more than 0.99 for the other metrics in all situations. By using a computationally simple method, based on the classical decision trees, we were able to achieve high diagnosis performance. Heg.IA system may be a way to overcome the testing unavailability in the context of Covid-19.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.

COVID-19's influence on cardiac function: a machine learning perspective on ECG analysis.

In December 2019, the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the world gave rise to probably the biggest public health problem in the world: the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially seen only as a disease of the respiratory system, COVID-19 is actually a blood disease with effects on the respiratory tract. Considering its influence on hematological parameters, how does COVID-19 affect cardiac function? Is it possible to support the clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 from the automatic analysis of electrocardiography? In this work, we sought to investigate how COVID-19 affects cardiac function using a machine learning approach to analyze electrocardiography (ECG) signals. We used a public database of ECG signals expressed as photographs of printed signals, obtained in the context of emergency care. This database has signals associated with abnormal heartbeat, myocardial infarction, history of myocardial infarction, COVID-19, and healthy heartbeat. We propose a system to support the diagnosis of COVID-19 based on hybrid deep architectures composed of pre-trained convolutional neural networks for feature extraction and Random Forests for classification. We investigated the LeNet, ResNet, and VGG16 networks. The best results were obtained with the VGG16 and Random Forest network with 100 trees, with attribute selection using particle swarm optimization. The instance size has been reduced from 4096 to 773 attributes. In the validation step, we obtained an accuracy of 94%, kappa index of 0.91, and sensitivity, specificity, and area under the ROC curve of 100%. This work showed that the influence of COVID-19 on cardiac function is quite considerable: COVID-19 did not present confusion with any heart disease, nor with signs of healthy individuals. It is also possible to build a solution to support the clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 in the context of emergency care from a non-invasive and technologically scalable solution, based on hybrid deep learning architectures.

Covid-19 diagnosis by combining RT-PCR and pseudo-convolutional machines to characterize virus sequences.

The Covid-19 pandemic, a disease transmitted by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has already caused the infection of more than 120 million people, of which 70 million have been recovered, while 3 million people have died. The high speed of infection has led to the rapid depletion of public health resources in most countries. RT-PCR is Covid-19's reference diagnostic method. In this work we propose a new technique for representing DNA sequences: they are divided into smaller sequences with overlap in a pseudo-convolutional approach and represented by co-occurrence matrices. This technique eliminates multiple sequence alignment. Through the proposed method, it is possible to identify virus sequences from a large database: 347,363 virus DNA sequences from 24 virus families and SARS-CoV-2. When comparing SARS-CoV-2 with virus families with similar symptoms, we obtained [Formula: see text] for sensitivity and [Formula: see text] for specificity with MLP classifier and 30% overlap. When SARS-CoV-2 is compared to other coronaviruses and healthy human DNA sequences, we obtained [Formula: see text] for sensitivity and [Formula: see text] for specificity with MLP and 50% overlap. Therefore, the molecular diagnosis of Covid-19 can be optimized by combining RT-PCR and our pseudo-convolutional method to identify DNA sequences for SARS-CoV-2 with greater specificity and sensitivity.

Covid-19 Dynamic Monitoring and Real-Time Spatio-Temporal Forecasting.

Background: Periodically, humanity is often faced with new and emerging viruses that can be a significant global threat. It has already been over a century post-the Spanish Flu pandemic, and we are witnessing a new type of coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2, which is responsible for Covid-19. It emerged from the city of Wuhan (China) in December 2019, and within a few months, the virus propagated itself globally now resulting more than 50 million cases with over 1 million deaths. The high infection rates coupled with dynamic population movement demands for tools, especially within a Brazilian context, that will support health managers to develop policies for controlling and combating the new virus. Methods: In this work, we propose a tool for real-time spatio-temporal analysis using a machine learning approach. The COVID-SGIS system brings together routinely collected health data on Covid-19 distributed across public health systems in Brazil, as well as taking to under consideration the geographic and time-dependent features of Covid-19 so as to make spatio-temporal predictions. The data are sub-divided by federative unit and municipality. In our case study, we made spatio-temporal predictions of the distribution of cases and deaths in Brazil and in each federative unit. Four regression methods were investigated: linear regression, support vector machines (polynomial kernels and RBF), multilayer perceptrons, and random forests. We use the percentage RMSE and the correlation coefficient as quality metrics. Results: For qualitative evaluation, we made spatio-temporal predictions for the period from 25 to 27 May 2020. Considering qualitatively and quantitatively the case of the State of Pernambuco and Brazil as a whole, linear regression presented the best prediction results (thematic maps with good data distribution, correlation coefficient >0.99 and RMSE (%) <4% for Pernambuco and around 5% for Brazil) with low training time: [0.00; 0.04 ms], CI 95%. Conclusion: Spatio-temporal analysis provided a broader assessment of those in the regions where the accumulated confirmed cases of Covid-19 were concentrated. It was possible to differentiate in the thematic maps the regions with the highest concentration of cases from the regions with low concentration and regions in the transition range. This approach is fundamental to support health managers and epidemiologists to elaborate policies and plans to control the Covid-19 pandemics.

COVID-SGIS: A Smart Tool for Dynamic Monitoring and Temporal Forecasting of Covid-19.

Background: The global burden of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The current spread of Covid-19 in Brazil is problematic causing a huge public health burden to its population and national health-care service. To evaluate strategies for alleviating such problems, it is necessary to forecast the number of cases and deaths in order to aid the stakeholders in the process of making decisions against the disease. We propose a novel system for real-time forecast of the cumulative cases of Covid-19 in Brazil. Methods: We developed the novel COVID-SGIS application for the real-time surveillance, forecast and spatial visualization of Covid-19 for Brazil. This system captures routinely reported Covid-19 information from 27 federative units from the Brazil.io database. It utilizes all Covid-19 confirmed case data that have been notified through the National Notification System, from March to May 2020. Time series ARIMA models were integrated for the forecast of cumulative number of Covid-19 cases and deaths. These include 6-days forecasts as graphical outputs for each federative unit in Brazil, separately, with its corresponding 95% CI for statistical significance. In addition, a worst and best scenarios are presented. Results: The following federative units (out of 27) were flagged by our ARIMA models showing statistically significant increasing temporal patterns of Covid-19 cases during the specified day-to-day period: Bahia, Maranhão, Piauí, Rio Grande do Norte, Amapá, Rondônia, where their day-to-day forecasts were within the 95% CI limits. Equally, the same findings were observed for Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Paraná, and Santa Catarina. The overall percentage error between the forecasted values and the actual values varied between 2.56 and 6.50%. For the days when the forecasts fell outside the forecast interval, the percentage errors in relation to the worst case scenario were below 5%. Conclusion: The proposed method for dynamic forecasting may be used to guide social policies and plan direct interventions in a cost-effective, concise, and robust manner. This novel tools can play an important role for guiding the course of action against the Covid-19 pandemic for Brazil and country neighbors in South America.