Telehealthcare and Telepathology in Pandemic: A Noninvasive, Low-Cost Micro-Invasive and Multimodal Real-Time Online Application for Early Diagnosis of COVID-19 Infection

TL;DR

This paper presents a cloud-based, multimodal telehealth application utilizing machine learning for early COVID-19 detection through symptoms, cough sounds, blood biomarkers, spectral data, and ECG images, achieving high accuracy and sensitivity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel real-time, multimodal telehealth platform with integrated ML models for accurate, low-cost COVID-19 diagnosis and risk assessment, adaptable for future pandemics.

Findings

Models achieve up to 100% accuracy in blood biomarker classification

Sensitivity of 100% for cough sound, blood biomarkers, and spectral data

92% accuracy in predicting patient mortality risk

Abstract

To contain the spread of the virus and stop the overcrowding of hospitalized patients, the coronavirus pandemic crippled healthcare facilities, mandating lockdowns and promoting remote work. As a result, telehealth has become increasingly popular for offering low-risk care to patients. However, the difficulty of preventing the next potential waves of infection has increased by constant virus mutation into new forms and a general lack of test kits, particularly in developing nations. In this research, a unique cloud-based application for the early identification of individuals who may have COVID-19 infection is proposed. The application provides five modes of diagnosis from possible symptoms (f1), cough sound (f2), specific blood biomarkers (f3), Raman spectral data of blood specimens (f4), and ECG signal paper-based image (f5). When a user selects an option and enters the information, the data is sent to the cloud server. The deployed machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models classify the data in real time and inform the user of the likelihood of COVID-19 infection. Our deployed models can classify with an accuracy of 100%, 99.80%, 99.55%, 95.65%, and 77.59% from f3, f4, f5, f2, and f1 respectively. Moreover, the sensitivity for f2, f3, and f4 is 100%, which indicates the correct identification of COVID positive patients. This is significant in limiting the spread of the virus. Additionally, another ML model, as seen to offer 92% accuracy serves to identify patients who, out of a large group of patients admitted to the hospital cohort, need immediate critical care support by estimating the mortality risk of patients from blood parameters. The instantaneous multimodal nature of our technique offers multiplex and accurate diagnostic methods, highlighting the effectiveness of telehealth as a simple, widely available, and low-cost diagnostic solution, even for future pandemics.