Pakistani Students Develop a Kit to Identify COVID Patients in 20 Seconds

[ThinkLogically]

CT Scan is the bottleneck here. You have to bring the patient to the CT scan which itself is a risky way as this can increase the spread of Coronavirus.

The cost quoted for the CT scan itself is more than the Coronavirus test so I don't think this method will pickup.

 

[Ace of Spades]

His symptoms like shortness of breath would have started even before the typical radiological findings on CT scan or CXR seeking medical attention. (Radiological findings will always lag behind onset of symptoms and resolution of disease/radiological findings will always lag behind even after disease has cleared.

On point; this type of methodology can be used when thousand are there with upper mild to severe symptoms to quickly go through CT for few slices for a quick AI based diagnosis. But for early diagnosis it won't help at all. Nonetheless an excellent effort by the students and government should integrate their program somewhere in the chain.

You DO need a qualified radiologist to read CT scan.

For initial AI training yes, but once enough data is given via physical input then no, it can work independently. Or already collected data from china can be incorporated and in that case no input would be needed.

However I am skeptical without knowing the specifics of the device and what is it looking for on CT results. 92% accuracy ?????
How is the sensitivity and specificity calculated without any test data collected on real cases?

increased bronchovascular markings even on a plain chest X-Ray and isolate those patients for further testing in the right clinical scenario.

As far as i have read the method china used, was to use AI to differentiate between pneumonia caused by covid-19 from community acquired pneumonia and other lung disorders. So it's a different modality with a purpose for differentiation and isolation of covid-19 pneumonia from other types instead of using it as a stand alone purely diagnostic tool.

 

[BringHarmony]

CT Scan is the bottleneck here. You have to bring the patient to the CT scan which itself is a risky way as this can increase the spread of Coronavirus.

The cost quoted for the CT scan itself is more than the Coronavirus test so I don't think this method will pickup.

Not just that. It detects the case a bit late in the chain. Ramping up on MDx is best option.

 

[Defense Reader]

You DO need a qualified radiologist to read CT scan.
And NO, a CT scan will not detect early stage disease but a PCR assay will.


Showbaz will obviously provide CT scan machines with a fat tooi commission for himself.

Brother my answer was regarding Ct scan machine facility. Which many honorable members was discussing.

 

[Yaseen1]

i think x rays used for tuberculosis can also do the same job,already corona test kits are being produced secretly in Pakistan and are exported in many european countries due to low price

 

[RealNapster]

Everyone is kind of jumping on the corona virus bandwagon but they miss the point. The cost of CT scan and PCR is same so why not PCR which is way more reliable and accurate. Apart from the cost aspect, CT scan facilities are limited and equipment expensive as compared to PCR. These students most probably trained tenser flow algorithm to detect virus in lungs CT scan, something not so novel or difficult.

I thought previously you had to wait 48 hours for results.

 

[jarves]

Not just that. It detects the case a bit late in the chain. Ramping up on MDx is best option.

Any claim of detecting the disease using Machine learning and replacing the existing methods is a scam, people who work in the field of Computer vision know this. It is a good time pass personal project though.

 

[mig25]

This looks to be a very cumbersome and expensive process. CT scans are very expensive and sometimes time-consuming if a contrast is needed. If contrast is needed the patient should be pre-pepped before he can be scanned.
Pneumonia is Pneumonia. I don't think there is a way to tell if the pneumonia was caused because of the covid19 virus from a scan. Hence, there are high chances for false positives if coronavirus detection is the goal. However, pneumonia caused by corona or something else will have the same treatment.

 

[BringHarmony]

Meet your nemesis : the cobas 8800.

One such system can do 10,000 test in a day. Beg, borrow or steal it and improve your test coverage.

There are only few hundreds of these deployed across the world.