The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified an already existing trend of people looking for healthcare solutions online. One class of solutions are symptom checkers, which have become very popular in the context of COVID-19. Traditional symptom checkers, however, are based on manually curated expert systems that are inflexible and hard to modify, especially in a quickly changing situation like the one we are facing today. That is why all COVID-19 existing solutions are manual symptom checkers that can only estimate the probability of this disease and cannot contemplate alternative hypothesis or come up with a differential diagnosis. While machine learning offers an alternative, the lack of reliable data does not make it easy to apply to COVID-19 either. In this paper we present an approach that combines the strengths of traditional AI expert systems and novel deep learning models. In doing so we can leverage prior knowledge as well as any amount of existing data to quickly derive models that best adapt to the current state of the world and latest scientific knowledge. We use the approach to train a COVID-19 aware differential diagnosis model that can be used for medical decision support both for doctors or patients. We show that our approach is able to accurately model new incoming data about COVID-19 while still preserving accuracy on conditions that had been modeled in the past. While our approach shows evident and clear advantages for an extreme situation like the one we are currently facing, we also show that its flexibility generalizes beyond this concrete, but very important, example.
Medical automatic diagnosis aims to imitate human doctors in real-world diagnostic processes and to achieve accurate diagnoses by interacting with the patients. The task is formulated as a sequential decision-making problem with a series of symptom inquiring steps and the final diagnosis. Recent research has studied incorporating reinforcement learning for symptom inquiring and classification techniques for disease diagnosis, respectively. However, studies on efficiently and effectively combining the two procedures are still lacking. To address this issue, we devise an adaptive mechanism to al…
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Automatic diagnosis has attracted increasing attention but remains challenging due to multi-step reasoning. Recent works usually address it by reinforcement learning methods. However, these methods show low efficiency and require taskspecific reward functions. Considering the conversation between doctor and patient allows doctors to probe for symptoms and make diagnoses, the diagnosis process can be naturally seen as the generation of a sequence including symptoms and diagnoses. Inspired by this, we reformulate automatic diagnosis as a symptoms Sequence Generation (SG) task and propose a simpl…
We propose a Healthcare Graph Convolutional Network (HealGCN) to offer disease self-diagnosis service for online users based on Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs). Two main challenges are focused in this paper for online disease diagnosis: (1) serving cold-start users via graph convolutional networks and (2) handling scarce clinical description via a symptom retrieval system. To this end, we first organize the EHR data into a heterogeneous graph that is capable of modeling complex interactions among users, symptoms and diseases, and tailor the graph representation learning towards disease di…
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science（麻省理工学院计算机科学实验室）
This paper derives a formula for computing the conditional probability of a set of candidates, where a candidate is a set of disorders that explain a given set of positive findings. Such candidate sets are produced by a recent method for multidisorder diagnosis called symptom clustering. A symptom clustering represents a set of candidates compactly as a cartesian product of differential diagnoses. By evaluating the probability of a candidate set, then, a large set of candidates can be validated or pruned simultaneously. The probability of a candidate set is then specialized to obtain the proba…
Mila-Quebec AI Institute（魁北克人工智能研究所Mila）；Dialogue Health Technologies Inc.（Dialogue健康技术公司）
There has been a rapidly growing interest in Automatic Symptom Detection (ASD) and Automatic Diagnosis (AD) systems in the machine learning research literature, aiming to assist doctors in telemedicine services. These systems are designed to interact with patients, collect evidence about their symptoms and relevant antecedents, and possibly make predictions about the underlying diseases. Doctors would review the interactions, including the evidence and the predictions, collect if necessary additional information from patients, before deciding on next steps. Despite recent progress in this area…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Knowledge based dialogue systems have attracted increasing research interest in diverse applications. However, for disease diagnosis, the widely used knowledge graph is hard to represent the symptom-symptom relations and symptom-disease relations since the edges of traditional knowledge graph are unweighted. Most research on disease diagnosis dialogue systems highly rely on data-driven methods and statistical features, lacking profound comprehension of symptom-disease relations and symptom-symptom relations. To tackle this issue, this work presents a weighted heterogeneous graph based dialogue…
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University（哈尔滨医科大学附属第二医院）
Based on a weighted knowledge graph to represent first-order knowledge and combining it with a probabilistic model, we propose a methodology for the creation of a medical knowledge network (MKN) in medical diagnosis. When a set of symptoms is activated for a specific patient, we can generate a ground medical knowledge network composed of symptom nodes and potential disease nodes. By Incorporating a Boltzmann machine into the potential function of a Markov network, we investigated the joint probability distribution of the MKN. In order to deal with numerical symptoms, a multivariate inference m…
Dibrugarh University Institute of Engineering and Technology（迪布鲁加尔大学工程技术学院）
The use of Artificial Intelligence is finding prominence not only in core computer areas, but also in cross disciplinary areas including medical diagnosis. In this paper, we present a rule based Expert System used in diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy. The expert system takes user input and depending on the symptoms of the patient, diagnoses if the patient is suffering from Cerebral Palsy. The Expert System also classifies the Cerebral Palsy as mild, moderate or severe based on the presented symptoms.
Edith Cowan University（伊迪丝·考恩大学）；University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学）
Deep learning is gaining instant popularity in computer aided diagnosis of COVID-19. Due to the high sensitivity of Computed Tomography (CT) to this disease, CT-based COVID-19 detection with visual models is currently at the forefront of medical imaging research. Outcomes published in this direction are frequently claiming highly accurate detection under deep transfer learning. This is leading medical technologists to believe that deep transfer learning is the mainstream solution for the problem. However, our critical analysis of the literature reveals an alarming performance disparity between…
Streamlining Social Media Information Retrieval for COVID-19 Research with Deep Learning
Harvard Chan School of Public Health（哈佛陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布列根和妇女医院）；Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
UAEU（阿拉伯联合酋长国大学）；Staffordshire University（斯塔福德郡大学）；Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学）
Respiratory symptoms can be a caused by different underlying conditions, and are often caused by viral infections, such as Influenza-like illnesses or other emerging viruses like the Coronavirus. These respiratory viruses, often, have common symptoms, including coughing, high temperature, congested nose, and difficulty breathing. However, early diagnosis of the type of the virus, can be crucial, especially in cases such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. One of the factors that contributed to the spread of the pandemic, was the late diagnosis or confusing it with regular flu-like symptoms. Scien…
Erzincan Binali Yıldırım University（埃尔津詹比纳利耶尔德勒姆大学）；Petrozavodsk State University（彼得罗扎沃茨克国立大学）
Since February 2020, the world has been engaged in an intense struggle with the COVID-19 dis-ease, and health systems have come under tragic pressure as the disease turned into a pandemic. The aim of this study is to obtain the most effective routine blood values (RBV) in the diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 using a backward feature elimination algorithm for the LogNNet reservoir neural network. The first dataset in the study consists of a total of 5296 patients with the same number of negative and positive COVID-19 tests. The LogNNet-model achieved the accuracy rate of 99.5% in the diagnos…
Duke Kunshan University（昆山杜克大学）；Suzhou Huanmu Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd（苏州寰木智能科技有限公司）
Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a progressive nervous system disorder that has affected more than 5.8 million people, especially the elderly. Due to the complexity of its symptoms and its similarity to other neurological disorders, early detection requires neurologists or PD specialists to be involved, which is not accessible to most old people. Therefore, we integrate smart mobile devices with AI technologies. In this paper, we introduce the framework of our developed PD early detection system which combines different tasks evaluating both motor and non-motor symptoms. With the developed model, w…
medicalvalues GmbH（medicalvalues有限公司）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Philipps-Universität Marburg（马尔堡菲利普斯大学）
Medical diagnosis is the process of making a prediction of the disease a patient is likely to have, given a set of symptoms and observations. This requires extensive expert knowledge, in particular when covering a large variety of diseases. Such knowledge can be coded in a knowledge graph -- encompassing diseases, symptoms, and diagnosis paths. Since both the knowledge itself and its encoding can be incomplete, refining the knowledge graph with additional information helps physicians making better predictions. At the same time, for deployment in a hospital, the diagnosis must be explainable an…
Prior to seeking professional medical care it is increasingly common for patients to use online resources such as automated symptom checkers. Many such systems attempt to provide a differential diagnosis based on the symptoms elucidated from the user, which may lead to anxiety if life or limb-threatening conditions are part of the list, a phenomenon termed 'cyberchondria' [1]. Systems that provide advice on where to seek help, rather than a diagnosis, are equally popular, and in our view provide the most useful information. In this technical report we describe how such a triage system can be m…
