# Clinical Features Predicting COVID-19 Severity Risk at the Time of Hospitalization

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an AI model that predicts the severity of COVID-19 at hospital admission using clinical data, helping improve patient care and resource allocation.

## Contribution

The study introduces CoSP, an interpretable AI model for predicting four levels of COVID-19 severity using clinical features at hospital admission.

## Key findings

- CoSP achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.95, AUPRC of 0.91, and a weighted F1-score of 0.83 in predicting severity.
- 19 out of 64 clinical features were identified as predictive of severity by the CoSP model.

## Abstract

The global spread of COVID-19 has led to significant mortality and morbidity worldwide. Early identification of COVID-19 patients who are at high risk of developing severe disease can help in improved patient management, care, and treatment, as well as in the effective allocation of hospital resources. The severity prediction at the time of hospitalization can be extremely helpful in deciding the treatment of COVID-19 patients. To this end, this study presents an interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) model, named COVID-19 severity predictor (CoSP) that predicts COVID-19 severity using the clinical features at the time of hospital admission. We utilized a dataset comprising 64 demographic and laboratory features of 7,416 confirmed COVID-19 patients that were collected at the time of hospital admission. The proposed hierarchical CoSP model performs four-class COVID severity risk prediction into asymptomatic, mild, moderate, and severe categories. CoSP yielded better performance with good interpretability, as observed via Shapley analysis on COVID severity prediction compared to the other popular ML methods, with an area under the received operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.95, an area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.91, and a weighted F1-score of 0.83. Out of 64 initial features, 19 features were inferred as predictive of the severity of COVID-19 disease by the CoSP model. Therefore, an AI model predicting COVID-19 severity may be helpful for early intervention, optimizing resource allocation, and guiding personalized treatments, potentially enabling healthcare professionals to save lives and allocate
resources effectively in the fight against the pandemic.