Addenbrooke's Hospital study into how artificial intelligence can be used to treat Covid
Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge is taking part in a ground-breaking study looking at how Artificial Intelligence can be used to predict how much oxygen a covid patient needs.
The research looks at the first four days of being treated and comes from data from hospitals across the world.
The technique, known as federated learning, used an algorithm to analyse chest x-rays and electronic health data from hospital patients with Covid symptoms.
To maintain strict patient confidentiality, the patient data was fully anonymised and aa algorithm was sent to each hospital so no data was shared or left its location.
Once the algorithm had 'learned' from the data, the analysis was brought together to build an AI tool which could predict the oxygen needs of hospital Covid patients anywhere in the world.
The study dubbed EXAM (for EMR CXR AI Model), is one of the largest, most diverse clinical federated learning studies to date.
The results showed it predicted the oxygen needed within 24 hours of a patient's arrival in the emergency department, with a sensitivity of 95 per cent and a specificity of over 88 per cent.
Bringing together collaborators across North and South America, Europe and Asia, the EXAM study took just two weeks of AI 'learning' to achieve high-quality predictions.
The outcomes of around 10,000 Covid patients from across the world were analysed in the study.
Including 250 who came to Addenbrooke's Hospital in the first wave of the pandemic in March/April 2020.