Originally published in IEEE Spectrum, Nov 4, 2020.<\/p>\n
Based on a cellphone-recorded cough, machine learning models accurately detect coronavirus even in people with no symptoms.<\/p>\n
Again and again, experts have pleaded that we need more and faster testing to control the coronavirus pandemicand many have suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) can help. Numerous COVID-19 diagnostics in development use AI to quickly analyze X-ray or CT scans, but these techniques require a chest scan at a medical facility.<\/p>\n
Since the spring, research teams have been working toward anytime, anywhere apps that could detect coronavirus in the bark of a cough. In June, a team at the University of Oklahoma showed it was possible to distinguish a COVID-19 cough from coughs due to other infections, and now a paper out of MIT, using the largest cough dataset yet, identifies asymptomatic people with a remarkable 100 percentdetection rate.<\/p>\n
If approved by the FDA and other regulators, COVID-19cough apps, in which a person records themselves coughing on command,could eventually be used for free, large-scale screening of the population.<\/p>\n
With potential like that, the field is rapidly growing: Teams pursuing similar projects include a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded initiative, Cough Against Covid, at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Mumbai; the Coughvid project out of the Embedded Systems Laboratory of the cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne in Switzerland; and the University of Cambridges COVID-19 Sounds project.<\/p>\n
The fact that multiple models can detect COVID in a cough suggeststhat there is no such thing astruly asymptomatic coronavirus infectionphysical changes alwaysoccurthat change the way a person produces sound. There arent many conditions that dont give you any symptoms, says Brian Subirana, director of the MIT Auto-ID lab and co-author on the recent study, published in the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.<\/p>\n
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