AI predicts how patients will fare against viral infections

Washington: Gene expression patterns associated with pandemic viral infections provide a map to help define patients' immune responses, measure disease severity, predict outcomes and test therapies, for current and future pandemics. Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine used an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to sift through terabytes of gene expression data, which genes are "on" or "off" during infection and to look for shared patterns in patients with past pandemic viral infections, including SARS, MERS and swine flu. Two telltale signatures emerged from the study, published in eBiomedicine called "AI-guided discovery of the invariant host response to viral pandemics". One, a set of 166 genes, reveals how the human immune system responds to viral infections. The second set of 20 signature genes predicts the severity of a patient's disease.