Can AI Identify Patients With Long COVID?

Long COVID refers to the condition where people experience long-term effects from their infection with the SARS CoV-2 virus that is responsible for the COVID-19 disease (Coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A new study published in The Lancet Digital Health applies artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning to identify patients with long COVID-19 using data from electronic health records with high accuracy. "Patients identified by our models as potentially having long COVID can be interpreted as patients warranting care at a specialty clinic for long COVID, which is an essential proxy for long COVID diagnosis as its definition continues to evolve," the researchers concluded. "We also achieve the urgent goal of identifying potential long COVID in patients for clinical trials." Globally there have been over 510 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 6.2 million deaths according to April 2022 statistics from Johns Hopkins University.