Detecting Early Signs of Insufficiency in COVID-19 Patients from CBC Tests Through a Supervised Learning Approach

Abstract

One important task in the COVID-19 clinical protocol involves the constant monitoring of patients to detect possible signs of insufficiency, which may eventually rapidly progress to hepatic, renal or respiratory failures. Hence, a prompt and correct clinical decision not only is critical for patients prognosis, but also can help when making collective decisions regarding hospital resource management. In this work, we present a network-based high-level classification technique to help healthcare professionals on this activity, by detecting early signs of insufficiency based on Complete Blood Count (CBC) test results. We start by building a training dataset, comprising both CBC and specific tests from a total of 2,982 COVID-19 patients, provided by a Brazilian hospital, to identify which CBC results are more effective to be used as biomarkers for detecting early signs of insufficiency. Basically, the trained classifier measures the compliance of the test instance to the pattern formation of the network constructed from the training data. To facilitate the application of the technique on larger datasets, a network reduction option is also introduced and tested. Numerical results show encouraging performance of our approach when compared to traditional techniques, both on benchmark datasets and on the built COVID-19 dataset, thus indicating that the proposed technique has potential to help medical workers in the severity assessment of patients. Especially those who work in regions with scarce material resources.