Spain has been one the European states worst hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.7 million detected cases[1]. Despite the second wave of infections that has hit the country over the past few months, the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona has succeeded in halving mortality among its coronavirus patients using artificial intelligence.
The Catalan hospital has developed a machine-learning tool that can predict when a COVID patient will deteriorate and how to customize that individual's treatment to avoid the worst outcome.
"When you have a sole patient who's in a critical state, you can take special care of them. But when they are 700 of them, you need this kind of tool," says Carol Garcia-Vidal, a physician specialized in infectious diseases and IDIBAPS[2] researcher who has led the development of the tool.
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Before the pandemic, the hospital had already been working on software to turn variable data into an analyzable form. So when the hospital started to receive COVID patients in March, it put the system to work analyzing three trillion pieces of structured and anonymized data from 2,000 patients.
The goal was to train it to recognize patterns and check what treatments were the most effective for each patient and when they should be administered.
That work underlined to Garcia-Vidal and her team that the virus doesn't manifest itself in the same way for everyone. "There are patients with an inflammatory response, patients with coagulopathies and patients who develop super infections," García-Vidal tells ZDNet. Each group needs different drugs and thus a personalized treatment[4].
Thanks to an EIT Health[5] grant,