[ExI] AI Can Diagnose COVID-19 Through Cellphone-Recorded Coughs – Even if You Don’t Have Symptoms!

[John Grigg]

"Asymptomatic people who are infected with Covid-19 exhibit, by definition,
no discernible physical symptoms of the disease. They are thus less likely
to seek out testing for the virus, and could unknowingly spread the
infection to others.

But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes
wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are
asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they
cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it
turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence.

In a paper published recently in the *IEEE Journal of Engineering in
Medicine and Biology*, the team reports on an AI model that distinguishes
asymptomatic people from healthy individuals through forced-cough
recordings, which people voluntarily submitted through web browsers and
devices such as cellphones and laptops.

The researchers trained the model on tens of thousands of samples of
coughs, as well as spoken words. When they fed the model new cough
recordings, it accurately identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people who
were confirmed to have Covid-19, including 100 percent of coughs from
asymptomatics — who reported they did not have symptoms but had tested
positive for the virus.

The team is working on incorporating the model into a user-friendly app,
which if FDA-approved and adopted on a large scale could potentially be a
free, convenient, noninvasive prescreening tool to identify people who are
likely to be asymptomatic for Covid-19. A user could log in daily, cough
into their phone, and instantly get information on whether they might be
infected and therefore should confirm with a formal test."
https://scitechdaily.com/ai-can-diagnose-covid-19-through-cellphone-recorded-coughs-even-if-you-dont-have-symptoms/
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