New app could be early diagnosis tool for COVID-19 in future

A new app which assesses CT images of patients’ lungs could prove to be a useful tool in the future for frontline NHS staff dealing with suspected COVID-19 cases.

Developed by computer scientists at the University of Essex, the app is already showing a good rate of accuracy despite being at an early stage of development. 

The COVID-19 detection app works by a CT scan of a patient’s lungs being uploaded and then it will give the percentage of the risk of being infected by COVID-19. If successful, the app could prove a useful early diagnosis test for COVID-19 which would take under an hour from CT scan to result, compared to swab tests where results can take a minimum of 24 hours. 

The team from the School of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering working on the project are MSc student Suraj Ghuwalewala, under the guidance of Dr Haider Raza, an expert in artificial intelligence (AI) for decision making.  
 
The challenge for Suraj and Dr Raza is there is a lack of available CT scan data for COVID-19. They have used an open-source CT lung scan dataset approved by the senior radiologist in Tongji Hospital, China. However, they are hoping to partner with an NHS Trust to enrich the CT image dataset as including more images in training the AI model may improve the accuracy of the app, which works well in the theory of deep learning, which is a function of AI.