JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

For COVID-19 patients' accurate prediction of disease severity and mortality risk would greatly improve care delivery and resource allocation. There are many patient-related factors, such as pre-existing comorbidities that affect disease severity.

Objective:

Since rapid automated profiling of peripheral blood samples is widely available, we investigated how such data from the peripheral blood of COVID-19 patients might be used to predict clinical outcomes.

Methods:

We thus investigated such clinical datasets from COVID-19 patients with known outcomes by combining statistical comparison and correlation methods with machine learning algorithms; the latter included decision tree, random forest, variants of gradient boosting machine, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbour and deep learning methods.

Results:

Our work revealed several clinical parameters measurable in blood samples, which discriminated between healthy people and COVID-19 positive patients and showed predictive value for later severity of COVID-19 symptoms. We thus developed a number of analytic methods that showed accuracy and precision for disease severity and mortality outcome predictions that were above 90%.

Conclusions:

In sum, we developed methodologies to analyse patient routine clinical data which enables more accurate prediction of COVID-19 patient outcomes. This type of approaches could, by employing standard hospital laboratory analyses of patient blood, be utilised to identify, COVID-19 patients at high risk of mortality and so enable their treatment to be optimised.