AI system for predicting the deterioration of COVID-19 patients in the emergency department

During the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid and accurate triage of patients at the emergency department is critical to inform decision-making. We propose a datadriven approach for prediction of deterioration risk using a deep neural network that learns from chest X-ray images, and a gradient boosting model that learns from routine clinical variables. Our AI prognosis system, trained using data from 3,661 patients, achieves the AUC of 0.786 (95% CI: 0.742-0.827) when predicting deterioration within 96 hours. Our deep neural network indicates informative areas of chest X-ray images to assist clinicians in interpreting the predictions, and performs comparably to two experienced chest radiologists in a reader study. In summary, our findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed system for assisting front-line physicians in the triage of COVID-19 patients.