The COVID-19 corona virus has claimed 4.1 million lives, as of July 24, 2021. A variety of machine learning models have been applied to related data to predict important factors such as the severity of the disease, infection rate and discover important prognostic factors. Often the usefulness of the findings from the use of these techniques is reduced due to lack of method interpretability. Some recent progress made on the interpretability of machine learning models has the potential to unravel more insights while using conventional machine learning models. In this work, we analyze COVID-19 blood work data with some of the popular machine learning models; then we employ state-of-the-art post-hoc local interpretability techniques(e.g.- SHAP, LIME), and global interpretability techniques(e.g. - symbolic metamodeling) to the trained black-box models to draw interpretable conclusions. In the gamut of machine learning algorithms, regressions remain one of the simplest and most explainable models with clear mathematical formulation. We explore one of the most recent techniques called symbolic metamodeling to find the mathematical expression of the machine learning models for COVID-19. We identify Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), initial Albumin level (ALBI), Aspartate aminotransferase (ASTI), Total Bilirubin initial(TBILI) and D-Dimer initial (DIMER) as major prognostic factors of the disease severity. Our contributions are- (i) uncover the underlying mathematical expression for the black-box models on COVID-19 severity prediction task (ii) we are the first to apply symbolic metamodeling to this task, and (iii) discover important features and feature interactions.
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；AstraZeneca（阿斯利康）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Royal Papworth Hospital（皇家帕普沃斯医院）；Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust（剑桥大学医院国民医疗服务信托）
Machine learning methods offer great promise for fast and accurate detection and prognostication of COVID-19 from standard-of-care chest radiographs (CXR) and computed tomography (CT) images. Many articles have been published in 2020 describing new machine learning-based models for both of these tasks, but it is unclear which are of potential clinical utility. In this systematic review, we search EMBASE via OVID, MEDLINE via PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv for published papers and preprints uploaded from January 1, 2020 to October 3, 2020 which describe new machine learning models for the d…
An accurate and efficient forecasting system is imperative to the prevention of emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19 in public health. This system requires accurate transient modeling, lower computation cost, and fewer observation data. To tackle these three challenges, we propose a novel deep learning approach using black-box knowledge distillation for both accurate and efficient transmission dynamics prediction in a practical manner. First, we leverage mixture models to develop an accurate, comprehensive, yet impractical simulation system. Next, we use simulated observation sequence…
NYU Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Abu Dhabi Health Services（阿布扎比医疗服务公司）；G42 Healthcare（G42医疗）
Existing prognostic tools mainly focus on predicting the risk of mortality among patients with coronavirus disease 2019. However, clinical evidence suggests that COVID-19 can result in non-mortal complications that affect patient prognosis. To support patient risk stratification, we aimed to develop a prognostic system that predicts complications common to COVID-19. In this retrospective study, we used data collected from 3,352 COVID-19 patient encounters admitted to 18 facilities between April 1 and April 30, 2020, in Abu Dhabi (AD), UAE. The hospitals were split based on geographical proximi…
Multi-Dataset Multi-Task Learning for COVID-19 Prognosis
Unit of Computer Systems \& Bioinformatics, Department of Engineering, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy College of Computer Science；Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Common compartmental modeling for COVID-19 is based on a priori knowledge and numerous assumptions. Additionally, they do not systematically incorporate asymptomatic cases. Our study aimed at providing a framework for data-driven approaches, by leveraging the strengths of the grey-box system theory or grey-box identification, known for its robustness in problem solving under partial, incomplete, or uncertain data. Empirical data on confirmed cases and deaths, extracted from an open source repository were used to develop the SEAIRD compartment model. Adjustments were made to fit current knowled…
Canadian VIGOUR Centre, University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学加拿大VIGOUR中心）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Alberta Health Services（阿尔伯塔卫生服务局）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）
Pandemic outbreaks such as COVID-19 occur unexpectedly, and need immediate action due to their potential devastating consequences on global health. Point-of-care routine assessments such as electrocardiogram (ECG), can be used to develop prediction models for identifying individuals at risk. However, there is often too little clinically-annotated medical data, especially in early phases of a pandemic, to develop accurate prediction models. In such situations, historical pre-pandemic health records can be utilized to estimate a preliminary model, which can then be fine-tuned based on limited av…
COVIDx-US -- An open-access benchmark dataset of ultrasound imaging data for AI-driven COVID-19 analytics
National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute（滑铁卢人工智能研究所）；Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital（奥克维尔特拉法加纪念医院）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）
Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；University of Dhaka（达卡大学）；College of Medicine, QU Health, Qatar University（卡塔尔大学QU Health医学院）；Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia（马来西亚国民大学）
COVID-19 pandemic has created an extreme pressure on the global healthcare services. Fast, reliable and early clinical assessment of the severity of the disease can help in allocating and prioritizing resources to reduce mortality. In order to study the important blood biomarkers for predicting disease mortality, a retrospective study was conducted on 375 COVID-19 positive patients admitted to Tongji Hospital (China) from January 10 to February 18, 2020. Demographic and clinical characteristics, and patient outcomes were investigated using machine learning tools to identify key biomarkers to p…
COVID-19 Image Data Collection: Prospective Predictions Are the Future
Mila（米拉研究所）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Fontbonne University（芳邦大学）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Stony Brook Medicine（石溪医学院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
HY Medical Technology（汇医慧影）；Coventry University（考文垂大学）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Hospital of PLA（解放军910医院）；Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学附属第五医院）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Imaging（广东省生物医学影像重点实验室）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
The black-box nature of machine learning models hinders the deployment of some high-accuracy models in medical diagnosis. It is risky to put one's life in the hands of models that medical researchers do not fully understand. However, through model interpretation, black-box models can promptly reveal significant biomarkers that medical practitioners may have overlooked due to the surge of infected patients in the COVID-19 pandemic. This research leverages a database of 92 patients with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 laboratory tests between 18th Jan. 2020 and 5th Mar. 2020, in Zhuhai, China, to identify …
In this work we design an end-to-end deep learning architecture for predicting, on Chest X-rays images (CXR), a multi-regional score conveying the degree of lung compromise in COVID-19 patients. Such semi-quantitative scoring system, namely Brixia~score, is applied in serial monitoring of such patients, showing significant prognostic value, in one of the hospitals that experienced one of the highest pandemic peaks in Italy. To solve such a challenging visual task, we adopt a weakly supervised learning strategy structured to handle different tasks (segmentation, spatial alignment, and score est…
COVID-19 has been one of the most severe diseases, causing a harsh pandemic all over the world, since December 2019. The aim of this study is to evaluate the value of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks in forecasting the total number of COVID-19 cases in Turkey. The COVID-19 data for 30 days, between March 24 and April 23, 2020, are used to estimate the next fifteen days. The mean absolute error of the LSTM Network for 15 days estimation is 1,69$\pm$1.35%. Whereas, for the same data, the error of the Box-Jenkins method is 3.24$\pm$1.56%, Prophet method is 6.88$\pm$4.96% and Holt-Winters Ad…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center（贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心）；Fundacion Progreso y Salud（进步与健康基金会）；National Tsing Hua University（台湾清华大学）；Albert Einstein Medical Center（阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦医疗中心）；Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆·凯特琳癌症中心）；National University Hospital（新加坡国立大学医院）；Hoboken University Medical Center–CarePoint Health（霍博肯大学医疗中心-CarePoint Health）；Hospital Universitario Monteprincipe（蒙特普林西比大学医院）；Grupo HM Hospitales（HM医院集团）；Seoul National University College of Medicine（首尔大学医学院）；Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares（国家心血管研究中心）；Instituto de Salud Carlos III（卡洛斯三世健康研究所）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛大学陈曾熙公共卫生学院）
The unprecedented global crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked numerous efforts to create predictive models for the detection and prognostication of SARS-CoV-2 infections with the goal of helping health systems allocate resources. Machine learning models, in particular, hold promise for their ability to leverage patient clinical information and medical images for prediction. However, most of the published COVID-19 prediction models thus far have little clinical utility due to methodological flaws and lack of appropriate validation. In this paper, we describe our methodology…
Ludwig Maximilian Universität（路德维希-马克西米利安大学）；Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health（亥姆霍兹慕尼黑中心——德国环境健康研究中心）
During 2020, the infection rate of COVID-19 has been investigated by many scholars from different research fields. In this context, reliable and interpretable forecasts of disease incidents are a vital tool for policymakers to manage healthcare resources. Several experts have called for the necessity to account for human mobility to explain the spread of COVID-19. Existing approaches are often applying standard models of the respective research field. This habit, however, often comes along with certain restrictions. For instance, most statistical or epidemiological models cannot directly incor…
Deep learning has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance for a variety of challenging computer vision tasks. On one hand, this has enabled deep visual models to pave the way for a plethora of critical applications like disease prognostics and smart surveillance. On the other, deep learning has also been found vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which calls for new techniques to defend deep models against these attacks. Among the attack algorithms, the black-box schemes are of serious practical concern since they only need publicly available knowledge of the targeted model. We carefully analy…
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are known for their excellent feature extraction capabilities to enable the learning of models from data, yet are used as black boxes. An interpretation of the convolutional filtres and associated features can help to establish an understanding of CNN to distinguish various classes. In this work, we focus on the explainability of a CNN model called as cnnexplain that is used for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 classification with a focus on the interpretability of features by the convolutional filters, and how these features contribute to classification. Specifica…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
Convolutional neural networks are showing promise in the automatic diagnosis of thoracic pathologies on chest x-rays. Their black-box nature has sparked many recent works to explain the prediction via input feature attribution methods (aka saliency methods). However, input feature attribution methods merely identify the importance of input regions for the prediction and lack semantic interpretation of model behavior. In this work, we first identify the semantics associated with internal units (feature maps) of the network. We proceed to investigate the following questions; Does a regression mo…
In this paper, our focus is on constructing models to assist a clinician in the diagnosis of COVID-19 patients in situations where it is easier and cheaper to obtain X-ray data than to obtain high-quality images like those from CT scans. Deep neural networks have repeatedly been shown to be capable of constructing highly predictive models for disease detection directly from image data. However, their use in assisting clinicians has repeatedly hit a stumbling block due to their black-box nature. Some of this difficulty can be alleviated if predictions were accompanied by explanations expressed …
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Machine-learned black-box policies are ubiquitous for nonlinear control problems. Meanwhile, crude model information is often available for these problems from, e.g., linear approximations of nonlinear dynamics. We study the problem of equipping a black-box control policy with model-based advice for nonlinear control on a single trajectory. We first show a general negative result that a naive convex combination of a black-box policy and a linear model-based policy can lead to instability, even if the two policies are both stabilizing. We then propose an adaptive $λ$-confident policy, with a co…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；China Electronics Cloud Brain (Tianjin) Technology CO., LTD（中电云脑（天津）科技有限公司）；Jiangsu University of Technology（江苏理工学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, the Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School（南京大学医学院附属鼓楼医院）；Lenovo Ltd.（联想集团）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Purpose: Accurate segmentation of lung and infection in COVID-19 CT scans plays an important role in the quantitative management of patients. Most of the existing studies are based on large and private annotated datasets that are impractical to obtain from a single institution, especially when radiologists are busy fighting the coronavirus disease. Furthermore, it is hard to compare current COVID-19 CT segmentation methods as they are developed on different datasets, trained in different settings, and evaluated with different metrics. Methods: To promote the development of data-efficient deep …
None To Optima in Few Shots: Bayesian Optimization with MDP Priors
School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）数据科学学院）；Computer Science Department, New York University（纽约大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, University at Albany, State University of New York（纽约州立大学阿尔巴尼分校计算机科学系）
The black-box nature of the deep networks makes the explanation for "why" they make certain predictions extremely challenging. Saliency maps are one of the most widely-used local explanation tools to alleviate this problem. One of the primary approaches for generating saliency maps is by optimizing a mask over the input dimensions so that the output of the network is influenced the most by the masking. However, prior work only studies such influence by removing evidence from the input. In this paper, we present iGOS++, a framework to generate saliency maps that are optimized for altering the o…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Scuola Normale Superiore（比萨高等师范学校）
The use of machine learning (ML) techniques in the biomedical field has become increasingly important, particularly with the large amounts of data generated by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, due to the complex nature of biomedical datasets and the use of black-box ML models, a lack of trust and adoption by domain experts can arise. In response, interpretable ML (IML) approaches have been developed, but the curse of dimensionality in biomedical datasets can lead to model instability. This paper proposes a novel computational strategy for the stratification of biomedical proble…
Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri)（环境系统研究所）；California State Polytechnic University, Pomona（加州州立理工大学波莫纳分校）
The paper quantifies the impact of race, poverty, politics, and age on COVID-19 vaccination rates in counties in the continental US. Both, OLS regression analysis and Random Forest machine learning algorithms are applied to quantify factors for county-level vaccination hesitancy. The machine learning model considers joint effects of variables (race/ethnicity, partisanship, age, etc.) simultaneously to capture the unique combination of these factors on the vaccination rate. By implementing a state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence Explanations (AIX) algorithm, it is possible to solve the black…
