AI tool predicts which COVID-19 patients need ventilator

The AI tool, developed at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, analysed CT scans from nearly 900 COVID-19 patients diagnosed in 2020 and was able to predict ventilator need with 84 per cent accuracy.

“That could be important for physicians as they plan how to care for a patient - and, of course, for the patient and their family to know,” said Anant Madabhushi, the Donnell Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve and head of the Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD). “It could also be important for hospitals as they determine how many ventilators they’ll need.”

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Next, Madabhushi said he hopes to use those results to try out the computational tool in real time at University Hospitals and Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center with COVID-19 patients.

If successful, he said medical staff at the two hospitals could upload a digitised image of the chest scan to a cloud-based application, where the AI at Case Western Reserve would analyse it and predict whether that patient would need a ventilator.