Applying machine learning to assist the diagnosis of COVID-19 from blood and urine exams

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic declared in March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) challenged the health system of several countries with the growing number of infected people. During the pandemic's peak in Europe, the low incidence of infection in South Korea drew the international community's attention, since not long ago that country was considered the epicenter of the pandemic outside its origin, in China. The mass testing protocol and tracing policies were pointed out as the formula for South Korean success, however, in view of the high demand and little supply of diagnostic tests for COVID-19 in the market, this strategy proved to be unfeasible to be implemented mainly in countries with large populations and with few financial resources, such as Brazil. There is also the aggravating factor regarding the effectiveness of the tests currently available, especially the rapid serology test with a high rate of false negatives. In order to offer a screening method for the application of tests, this work aims to develop a predictive model for assisting the identification of COVID-19 infection in suspected patients based on data from clinical laboratory examinations, such as blood count and urine tests. The data used comes from three sources in Sao Paulo and are hosted in the COVID-19 Data Sharing/BR Repository, a shared database of Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The work also proposes a comparison between balanced × imbalanced dataset and traditional × ensemble algorithms for this problem.