Kloman Metre: An EMD-Based Tool for Triaging Diseases Leading to Lung Infections Including COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The digital revolution can help developing countries to overcome the problem of limited healthcare infrastructure in developing nations such as India. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the urgency of integration of digital technologies into healthcare infrastructure. In order to solve the issue of lack of trained healthcare professionals at public health centres (PHCs), researchers are trying to build tools which can help to tag pulmonary ailment within a fraction of second. Such tagging will help the medical community to utilize their time more efficiently. In this work, we have tried to assess the “lung health” of patients suffering from a variety of pulmonary diseases including COVID-19, tuberculosis and pneumonia by applying Earth Mover’s Distance algorithm to the X-ray images of the patients. The lung X-ray images of patients suffering from pneumonia, TB and COVID-19 and healthy persons are pooled together from various datasets. Our preliminary data based upon 100 random images depicting each type of lung disease such as COVID-19, tuberculosis and pneumonia revealed that patients suffering from tuberculosis have the highest severity as per the values obtained from the EMD scale. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.