Haematological and radiological-based prognostic markers of COVID-19.

BACKGROUND: Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has emerged in 2019 and caused a global pandemic in 2020, manifesting in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The majority of patients exhibit a mild form of the disease with no major complications; however, moderate to severe and fatal cases are of public health concerns. Predicting the potential prognosis of COVID-19 could assist healthcare workers in managing cases and controlling the pandemic in an effective way. Therefore, the objectives of the study were to search for biomarkers associated with COVID-19 mortality and predictors of the overall survival (OS). METHODS: Here, clinical data of 6026 adult COVID-19 patients admitted to two large centers in Saudi Arabia (Riyadh and Hafar Al-Batin cities) between April and June 2020 were retrospectively analysed. RESULTS: More than 23% of the study subjects with available data have died, enabling the prediction of mortality in our cohort. Markers that were significantly associated with mortality in this study were older age, increased d-dimer in the blood, higher counts of WBCs, higher percentage of neutrophil, and a higher chest X-ray (CXR) score. The CXR scores were also positively associated with age, d-dimer, WBC count, and percentage of neutrophil. This supports the utility of CXR scores in the absence of blood testing. Predicting mortality based on Ct values of RT-PCR was not successful, necessitating a more quantitative RT-PCR to determine virus quantity in samples. Our work has also identified age, d-dimer concentration, leukocyte parameters and CXR score to be prognostic markers of the OS of COVID-19 patients. CONCLUSION: Overall, this retrospective study on hospitalised cohort of COVID-19 patients presents that age, haematological, and radiological data at the time of diagnosis are of value and could be used to guide better clinical management of COVID-19 patients.

Early Prediction of COVID-19 Ventilation Requirement and Mortality from Routinely Collected Baseline Chest Radiographs, Laboratory, and Clinical Data with Machine Learning.

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and created a global pandemic that overwhelmed healthcare systems. COVID-19, as of July 3, 2021, yielded 182 million confirmed cases and 3.9 million deaths globally according to the World Health Organization. Several patients who were initially diagnosed with mild or moderate COVID-19 later deteriorated and were reclassified to severe disease type. OBJECTIVE: The aim is to create a predictive model for COVID-19 ventilatory support and mortality early on from baseline (at the time of diagnosis) and routinely collected data of each patient (CXR, CBC, demographics, and patient history). METHODS: Four common machine learning algorithms, three data balancing techniques, and feature selection are used to build and validate predictive models for COVID-19 mechanical requirement and mortality. Baseline CXR, CBC, demographic, and clinical data were retrospectively collected from April 2, 2020, till June 18, 2020, for 5739 patients with confirmed PCR COVID-19 at King Abdulaziz Medical City in Riyadh. However, of those patients, only 1508 and 1513 have met the inclusion criteria for ventilatory support and mortalilty endpoints, respectively. RESULTS: In an independent test set, ventilation requirement predictive model with top 20 features selected with reliefF algorithm from baseline radiological, laboratory, and clinical data using support vector machines and random undersampling technique attained an AUC of 0.87 and a balanced accuracy of 0.81. For mortality endpoint, the top model yielded an AUC of 0.83 and a balanced accuracy of 0.80 using all features with balanced random forest. This indicates that with only routinely collected data our models can predict the outcome with good performance. The predictive ability of combined data consistently outperformed each data set individually for intubation and mortality. For the ventilator support, chest X-ray severity annotations alone performed better than comorbidity, complete blood count, age, or gender with an AUC of 0.85 and balanced accuracy of 0.79. For mortality, comorbidity alone achieved an AUC of 0.80 and a balanced accuracy of 0.72, which is higher than models that use either chest radiograph, laboratory, or demographic features only. CONCLUSION: The experimental results demonstrate the practicality of the proposed COVID-19 predictive tool for hospital resource planning and patients' prioritization in the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis.