AN artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm developed by Serba Dinamik Holdings Bhd’s artificial intelligence (SDAI) team is said to have correctly identified people with COVID-19 by just tabulating the sound of a patient’s cough.
The team headed by Dr Azree Shahrel Ahmad Nazri who is the Artificial Intelligence Society Malaysia (ARTIS) president has performed clinical tests on 150 participants with an outcome of 94% sensitivity for symptomatic cases among people who had received official positive COVID-19 RT-PCR test result while 88% sensitivity was recorded for those without any symptom.
In mass testing of 1,009 participants, the algorithm has achieved 94% accuracy, 96% sensitivity and 94% specificity.
This application known as AI-Screen is currently being evaluated by the National Technology & Innovation Sandbox (NTIS) which is an initiative under the Science, Technology & Innovation Ministry (MOSTI).
With the application, daily screening or pool testing of students, workers and public can be carried out to quickly alert an outbreak in groups as schools, jobs and transportation system re-open.
As an outcome from their collaboration, SDAI and ARTIS have managed to run up a dataset of 25,000 cough sample sounds in June 2020.
To further ensure the application’s efficiency, Serba Dinamik’s group managing director and CEO Datuk Mohd Abdul Karim Abdullah said users must nevertheless comply with the existing standard operating procedure (SOP) which is to take an RT-PCR test either at a government or private health facility for further confirmation.
“The inability to test at scale has become major problem in the ongoing war against the COVID-19 pandemic,” he noted. “AI-Screen application is a smartphone application which is capable to record and send three cough sounds to an AI engine and produce a result within the next two minutes.”
Above all else, the application jointly developed by SDAI-ARTIS offers a screening tool which is deployable anytime, anywhere by anyone.
“Cough manifests as a symptom in the majority but not all COVID-19 carriers. However, many studies show that coughing is one of the key mechanisms for the social spreading of COVID-19,” observed Abdul Karim.
According to him, a temperature scan is currently the predominant screening method for COVID-19, for example when entering an office or business premises. Between cough and fever, the number of non-COVID-19 medical conditions that can cause fever are much wider than the non-COVID-19 conditions that can cause cough.
“The AI-Screen application is not meant to replace or compete with the medical grade testing by any means. Instead, the application complements efforts to eventually reduce the pandemic into an endemic,” explained Abdul Karim.
“The SDAI-ARTIS team is targeting to collect more samples by focusing on the Delta variant. This pre-screening application method can be made accessible to the public by end-2021 after receiving NTIS approval.” – Nov 15, 2021
